Fortune Brainstorm Design 2022

Kate Aronowitz, Lead Operations Partner, GV; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design
Kristen Bellstrom, Executive Editor, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design
Jason Mayden, Designer; Co-founder and CEO, Trillicon Valley; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design
Brian O’Keefe, Senior Executive Editor, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Setting the Stage Embracing Radical Transformation

Conferences

Kate Aronowitz, GV;  
Kristen Bellstrom, FORTUNE;  
Jason Mayden, Trillicon Valley; 
Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE; 

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Welcome


Kate Aronowitz, GV; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design
Kristen Bellstrom, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design
Jason Mayden, Trillicon Valley; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design
Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design

Kate Aronowitz, Lead Operations Partner, GV; 
Kristen Bellstrom, Executive Editor, FORTUNE; 
Jason Mayden, Co-founder and CEO, Trillicon Valley; 
Brian O’Keefe, Senior Executive Editor, FORTUNE; 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Setting the Stage Embracing Radical Transformation


All right. It's great to see everybody. Hello and welcome to brainstorm design new york 2022 welcome to Brooklyn. The county of Kings. All right teddy give it up for Brooklyn. All right. It's great to see everybody here in person in my home borough and uh in one of new york's most designed forward hotels, I hope you'll have a chance to explore the building and the rooftop terrace that looks out over the Brooklyn bridge, if you haven't already. The hotel features several Brooklyn based artists and designers with work ranging from furniture to sculpture. Also, if you haven't been out there yet, the river park out here, none of that was there when I moved to Brooklyn. It's a great example of urban design. And if you go out there and look at the Brooklyn bridge and look at Manhattan, you might just be able to see the fortune offices or at least are building over there because it's right over there. Yeah, so you're really in our home turf and we're happy to have you here as we emerged slowly from the pandemic. We're we're getting there uh, fits and starts, but I think we all can appreciate how much gathering and meeting in person, really supports our emotional well being and we really want to thank you for joining us in making this happen. The turmoil over the past couple of years has tested our resilience. I think we can all agree on that as individuals, employees, citizens, the global pandemic social and political unrest. The increasingly apparent effects of climate change have all exposed vulnerabilities in our economy and society. It's also presented opportunities to apply design thinking to transform the nature of the products and services that we consume and that we make how and where we work our social structures, even our government. So over the next two days, we're going to hear from leading practitioners across the design spectrum, from private and social sector, as well as academia, we will explore how design thinking can catalyze radical business transformation and spurred the development of more inclusive organizations and cultures. Among the themes, we'll explore our work, reimagined talent, redefined digital ships, creating equity and building resilience. This afternoon, we'll talk to walmart's Chief design officer Valerie Casey about how the world's largest private sector employer is re fashioning operations to reach ambitious environmental goals. And speaking of walmart, I have to point out Fortune just today, has released the 68th edition of the Fortune 500 walmart once again is number one on the list. So congrats to walmart, Go check out number two through 500 to see the rest of us online, We need all the page views we can get uh later today we're going to explore the crucial role of design and building resilience with john Maeda, Chief technology Officer Ever bridge. We'll discuss how designed for social impact can expand health equity in a conversation with Krista Donaldson ceo of equalize health and Antoinette carroll. The founder of Creative Action Lab will share how we can design with greater humility but before we kick off a little bit of housekeeping, I want to just remind you about our reporting and social media rules, what is set up here on stage or in the breakout sessions is on the record, but what set over the table when you're just hanging out or over a meal or it breaks is private unless it's agreed upon by all the parties involved. So now we want to offer a tremendous thank you to our presenting partners, Salesforce and IBM for working to bring us all together here today, we really appreciate your contributions in advancing the idea of design and the design process is essential to business and to helping us bring brainstorm design to life. This has been a road to get here, little covid bumps in the road, but we're all here chuckling from those, you know, I'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge some of my fortune colleagues who will help lead the conversations here at brainstorm design. Fortune Media Ceo, Allen, Murray, Fortune leadership editor, Ruth Omo and Fortune, senior writer Phil Wahba. We look forward to your energy and insights over the next two days and of course these discussions would not be possible without the tireless work of our entire programming team and of the co chairs of the conference, Jason maiden designer Ceo and co founder Silicon Valley kate Aronowitz Lead operations partner google ventures and kristen Bell strum Fortune Executive editor. So a huge thank you to all of our co chairs and with that I'd like to welcome Jason kate and Kristen to the stage to get us started. Hey guys, how are we all feeling? Very cool. I'm sensing a lot of good energy in the room. Um, okay, we have this great program ahead of us that we've all been working on for months, months and months and I know we're all excited about a lot of different aspects of it, but I just thought we could share for the group before we dive into some of the conversations, some of our expectations, some of what's, you know, grabbing our attention what we're excited about and, and kate, I'm going to start with you. What are you? I'm curious what you're most excited about of all the things that we've that we've talked about, What are you looking forward to seeing over the next couple of days. Um, I was thinking as I was going to sleep last night, I had that giddy feeling that felt like when I was 13, going away to summer camp ready to like see all my friends I hadn't seen in a year, so I'm just happy to be together and being together To me, it means just meaningful conversations, all the conversations we've missed out on the past two years. Um we're gonna tackle really meaty topics up here. Um, but there's also gonna be really great conversations out there as well that I think are gonna be just as meaningful if not more than what's happening up here. So whatever is keeping you up at night, I hope you leave and Wednesday morning, You feel like energized, inspired and supported by a room of 200 people to tackle whatever is going on. So thank you for coming and it's just really exciting to be here awesome. Yeah, I feel that excitement to Jason. We've had so many conversations really kind of deep conversations actually over the last several months about kind of like this moment for design, but also how it connects to like kind of this moment for all of us as people and as a society, I'm just, I'd love to hear what you're thinking as we actually kick this off. Like why is this, why does this feel like a monumental moment and you know what is really kind of resonating for you? Yeah, I think for me this moment is special simply because design is not viewed in this instance as a service to a functional organization. It's actually in service of humanity. So the power and potential of our collective brilliance in this room unleashed across multiple sectors, we actually can move society forward. Typically designers looked at for its aesthetic prowess or its narrative, but now we're sitting in this room with intention and intelligence and then the capacity and agency to do something about it because each of you are leaders and designers in your own right. But we've never had a convergence of people that are being charged at this moment to think about problems that they may not experience themselves. So I just fundamentally believe that design can save the world, it can change the world, it can create new worlds and it's just how we see our social contracts with reality. And the great thing about creative people is we use imagination so we can make the world whatever we want to be, call it, make believe, pretend to be a kid, um have fun, meet new people and just enjoy each other's company because at the end of the day, we're properly present right now and this is the only moment we have. So if you can't take something from this, you can't feel some sense of purpose. Then I'm like, man, we failed beautifully sad. Uh so kristen you and I are not designers. No, unfortunately, we just like to hang out with designers. Um but we and we like to write about designers and and the role of design and business and just from that perspective, I'm curious, you know how you assess sort of this moment for? I mean this is something that we've written about and talked about a lot like where is designed in the business world. Uh you know, what is the evolution and and where are we coming out especially of this extraordinary, You know, 24 months or so where everybody has reconsidered how everything works. Well, I feel like this is a real moment for design and designers to shine. Um, we've seen companies including big companies rethinking things that, you know, if you talk to them 5, 10 years ago, they said we could never do, could never all be remote, We could never do x. We could never do why we could never do see. Um but now I feel like there's a door has opened that says, you know what, actually everything is up for grabs and we can really reinvent so much of how we work, um, how we engage with our communities, what our business is going to look like in the future. And I feel like there's a real openness in the business community to turn to, you know, designers and design thinkers to try to figure out the way forward. Great, okay, so we don't want to just listen to ourselves talk and share our own thoughts because we've been talking a lot uh, planning this thing, but we want to get you involved right away and hear what you're thinking. Um, and we have a little opening gamut to do that. So, um, for everyone here in the room and the online intend these attendees, we want to know what you think. So we are going to break the ice a little bit with a design pulse, a couple of questions we've prepared for you. We would love to get your responses and we're going to talk about it. We're gonna we're gonna view it in real time, your responses will remain remain anonymous. So I want everybody to participate if you feel like it. Um Now let's talk about how we're going to do it because there's uh there's a little bit of technology involved here. So yeah technology. Um So first you're gonna go to slide 0.com get your smart phones out of your laptop or your tablet or whatever slide oh dot com S. L. I. D. O dot com and you enter the event code design 22 that's all one word where you can scan the QR code on the screen and it'll take you right to the slide oh page show of hands is everybody kind of finding slide oh do you need a minute. A lot of people look intent like they're figuring it out. Okay, this is good. I feel like we have we're ready for the questions. Okay. So once I asked the first question, You'll have 30 seconds to choose an answer ready. Okay. Here's the first question which of these business challenges will have the greatest impact or influence on your work this year. Pick one a talent hiring and retaining great designers, the collaboration finding ways to work effectively and productively in hybrid and other environments. C global economic shifts, supply supply chain disruptions, geopolitical tensions, consumer trends etcetera. Okay, what would you say? Um I would say hiring and retaining and I think it's specifically actually retaining um hiring in many ways it's gotten easier because we've got access to more workforce. Um but I'm seeing people hop around a lot. It's it's hard for people to kind of grab and and retain people and and keep them attached to an organ. I think you're influencing the answers in real time because I don't think I know a secret, I will say after the last couple of days collaboration, we've been closing a magazine issue and uh you know, we figure it out, we've all figured it out, but sometimes you just want to go over and talk to somebody and not set up the zoom conversation. Okay, so I think we've reached the final tally, it just moved a little bit but kate was right on talent, I mean talent has been such a big conversation for at least a year now for for all kinds of companies not just design, but I mean what do you have a take on that? Jason? The talent environment out there especially as it relates to design. Yeah, I think for the first time the incentive structures that are typically used to attract corporate talent for creatives into structures are no longer attractive because people are making a trade off and they're using more discernment of where they want to spend their time and so when you give of yourself as a creative, it is a very taxing experience. It's hard to separate how you feel from what you work on. And so when people are faced with the decision of seeing society collapsing, seeing their family being affected by a pandemic, having to make real decisions around how to actually, you know, have a life that's enjoyable and being more present, um companies have to account for that because people are now looking at you know, not only their personal well being, but also how are they going to contribute to something bigger than just the P. And L. Right. And so I think companies are gonna have to find a very unique way to incentivize creative talent to stay into remain engaged because they want to deploy their skill set in different ways across the world. Yeah. And that challenge I think is woven into some of our conversations these next couple of days and it's not easy. I mean even if you wanna keep your employees happy, it's hard to figure out, you know, especially large company, large organization, a lot of different perspectives, you know, it's tough. All right, let's go to the second question. Here we go, what best describes the ethos of your whole organization or company? A design lead Design has a seat firmly planted at the table and is helping drive strategy at your company be designed in process designed as a consideration, but it's not living up to its potential as a strategic differentiator, See design curious interested in the potential of design but unsure of how to implement it. Alright. Go see where we go. Oh look at that. Mhm. Mhm. Nobody wants to admit to being designed, curious. They're here, they're here. They have both feet planted and design. Mhm wow. Okay so design led narrowly edges out design and process. I mean that is a tight race. Um What do you think? I mean that's I mean we're a design conference so we'd like to have a lot of design led people but um I think it's interesting that there's a lot of design and production process folks here too, which I think speaks also to our bigger themes about you know this greater appreciation of design. You work with so many different types of companies. What are you seeing in relation to that? Yeah. Well it's funny my initial reaction to that. I would never say design lead. I'm too paranoid like the design is always in process like like once you think you're ahead you're not um I I get to work with a lot of design curious companies but I have to say the curiosity is real, it's not about how can my you know app look better, it's how can I meaningfully connect with my customers, how can I bring something differentiated product to market and they want real design talented house. This isn't like you know the first engineer hired their friend to do design. This is they're coming to us with really interesting jobs, interesting problems and they want design at the table in a way that I haven't seen before in a way that really gives meaning to it. Um so that's exciting. But back to the first slide, there aren't enough people to take those roles. That's the challenge. We get startups, really excited about design, they're like I'm ready and they're like no one for you. So um it all kind of comes back on each other Jason, what do you how do you advise people or just consult with them on their, you know if they're in organizations on its journey from design curious to design and process to you know, hopefully design lead. You know what what's the advice? I would say the first piece of advice I would give a company that's trending in that direction is that design is not at the end of the process is at the beginning and so our job is to ask the biggest question, but most people think our job is to provide just a singular solution. And the reason why question asking is important is because before you initiate design, do you even know how to treat your employees well? Because the first thing you're designing is the culture of your company. The first product comes from that right? And so it organizationally holds up a mirror to itself and says, are we poised to not only bring design in but then deployed across our own workforce and then into the market. So that would be the first question I would say is how are you treating each other internally? Because that is a design challenge because you can hire us as a function, we can make beautiful things, but if employees are still miserable, it's like did we really solve the problem that we actually intended to solve so? And then secondarily, um just remaining curious and as kate mentioned, you know, understanding that designers ever changing, you can't just say, I'm gonna get a designer and it fixes everything you have to be open to evolving with us because we're learning with new capabilities, new data and new insights. So it's a very fluid career path for a lot of us and I think organizations have a hard time with creatives who can move across multiple verticals at one time. So you work with a lot of young companies startups, right? And you, you said like they're, they're eager yes, design, you persuaded us. We love it now if you can find designers, but what's the friction when they actually get folks in and they start asking those questions is that a common like, you know, first stumbling point for them to get used to the process. I mean we're lucky in that um, if we have a meaningful conversation with the founder, it's early and we really do a lot of back work to make sure that they're truly ready to have design at the table. So, um, again, I think it's to your point, if you can get them in early, I think that they understand they're there to ask big questions. Like our first question to all of our startup founders, we don't ask a design question. We ask a narrow question in a narrow answer back, we just say what keeps you up at night, and then we start exploring really big questions from there. And if designs the answer, we like to help them find it. Um, and if it's not, you know, we we move on, but mostly they are all designed problems at the end of the day, we find our way. Alright, well, thanks gang, thanks to everybody in the audience for playing along with our two questions. I think this has been a really stimulating way to kick things off. I'm excited. And uh, I think without further ado we are going to dive right into our program. Let's go, all right, all right, take it away, chris

Bracken Darrell, President and CEO, Logitech 
In conversation with: Kristen Bellstrom, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Business Transformation By Design 

Valerie Casey, Senior Vice President and Chief Design Officer, Walmart 
In conversation with: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing A Regenerative Company 

three years ago walmart, which as you heard from brian's introduction is the world's largest company by revenue announced its goal of becoming a regenerative regenerative company, one that works uh to restore renew and replenish in in addition to preserving our planet. In the words of its Ceo doug McMillon to help combat the climate crisis, the giant retailer also aims to reach net zero carbon emissions by virtue of its Oh I'm sorry by 2040 by virtue of its global footprint and involvement in myriad supply chains. The beast from benton ville has tremendous influence. Uh We're going to ask how design thinking is helping the company achieve its ambitious goal. Oh I'm sorry community cards, please welcome to the stage. Yeah, Valerie, Casey, Senior Vice President and Chief Design Officer of Walmart in conversation with 14 Media Ceo Allen Murray. Sorry about that. Valerie thank you so much for being here and thanks to the co chairs for letting me do this interview because I'm I'm I'm really excited about it. We're going to get to the regenerative company. But I first want to ask you, I mean I've looked at your background a lot of it was in social impact, environmental impact, how in the world did you end up at walmart? This is a question that I have been asked many many times because I spent about 15 years of my career in the design agency world. So I. D. O. Pentagram frog design and then was doing different things internationally for about 10 years um as well as working at Samsung in product actually. Um And um I the way I came to walmart um was quite interesting. I moved to America when I was small and we never lived near at walmart, so we didn't grow up with that typical kind of people said, oh yeah, you know, we could always go to the walmart and pick up, that wasn't part of my my kind of lived experience. Um but I was very involved in the World Economic Forum and I would run all of these workshops and design thinking sessions for lots of people at Davos and other places. Um and I was in this forum with different C level executives. Um and this woman was over in this area talking about her company and talking about innovation and it was so it was so different than the way I had heard about innovation being discussed before, and it involved thinking about associates, which is the name that we give to employees. It involved thinking about the planet and involves thinking about how to be more competitive in the marketplace. And I quietly turned to the person next to me and I said, where did she say she worked? And she said, oh she works at walmart, and I said, no, no, no, that person. And just because I couldn't possibly fathom that this was walmart. And literally that day I went home, I rang up somebody who I knew worked at walmart and he said, actually, we have this project and you'd be perfect for it. Four days later I was in Pentonville and um about six months later I took on the role to kind of bring together the design teams that had been sort of sprinkled throughout the organization and turned it into something. So it wouldn't, it was not in my consideration set, but I I kind of came into it realizing that so when you got there four years ago you feel like it was already a design forward company? No, no, no. I think that, you know, at the time it was, you know, it's kind of some of the reflections, I think many of us have right design is appreciated but it's it's it's often thought of just on the surface design curious. Yeah, exactly. Design curious or maybe even before that and you can start to see that when you bring designers together to do things that are more significant around the thinking rather than just the decoration. Um you can actually get some significant business impact. And I think actually on that, that front when I joined and I brought the teams together. One of the first things I realized that we could do was speaking the lingua franca of the organization, which as you can see from it's still being the fortune one by revenue, right that the what the lingua franca of the company is all of these measurements. So how much does this feature due to bring customers in? How much GM v how much conversion, how much cP contribution profit. And so one of the first things that we did every single quarter, we meticulously across our entire portfolio took every single feature and measured it and it could have been moving a button up in the page, it might be a new feature, it might be a new product and we produced a quarterly impact report and we just sent it out and just said this is what design can do. And after about 345 quarters we ended up not having to do that report anymore because people saw that design was not a decorative nice to have. It was actually a business level. So before we get to the regenerative company, give us one example of how you were able to do that use metrics and drive change because walmart is that it's just a massive organization. It is one of the largest companies in the world, the largest by revenue. So give us an example of how you were able to use a design process to change driver change of the organization. We have so we have imagined this and I have never heard of the beast from Bentonville and be discussed before. There was interesting way to bring me out. Thank you. Uh we're among friends here. You know, it feels like a little like a high school reunion. Um, but one of the things that um, that we have is about 1.4 million associates. So all the associates who work, whether it's in the front end, checking you out or doing inventory or the back of the house supply chain. So 1.4 million associates and throughout the 60 years of the company, all of the tools and services that they used had been built independently and they had been built with the best intentions, right? How do we help people make, you know, do their jobs in a better way? But as a result, there were literally over 100 products that somebody who was coming on as a shift worker might have to learn how to use if they were coming to work in the store. So you're talking about dozens and dozens of hours of training that could be averted if you actually consolidated, got rid of some of those things and then actually created and applied a design language so that as soon as you learned how to use and this was a philosophy. As soon as you learned how to use the newly redesigned walmart app, you could use any tool or service to be an associate at wal mart because our associates are also customers. So we brought in this concept of consumer grade tools for everyone. Got rid of the idea that an enterprise approach where you have a captive audience and well, they probably don't need design as much as as customers do. Um got rid of that and created this continuous set of patterns and interactions. And then what we did was we co created with Associates, we said, what's the thing that frustrates you the most? Well, obviously the thing, one of the things that frustrates people the most um is having to walk all the way to the back of the store to check in for their shift. So how do we, could we bring in a digital way to check in? Another thing is that, and you probably any of them who shops at walmart probably as experiences if someone doesn't know the answer, they'll say, hey, hey joe, Where was that? Where was that toy? Or where was that, where our vacuums again? Or do you remember where that is? There was sort of this informal kind of exchange of information. So we just created a simple push to talk the way that they could communicate with each other. How can we get people to more easily change their shifts? And we basically built about a half a dozen core features that the Associates said that had never been built. It was the thing that all helped them feel kind of a better sense of efficacy. So it didn't impact their ability to perform on measures that we were actually looking at. But God, it really made them feel like they wanted to work at walmart. Yes. So what's, so that's building? So we built that app and shifted and we're on the sixth version of it? That's awesome. And and that's that's building great apps, but when you start talking about the regenerative company, you're kicking it up A level, you're really talking about changing all the fundamental business processes of the company so that it is focused on sustainability goals as the design lead. How do you do that? Yeah, well this is that kind of that other definition of design, where design moves past surface and it moves past, just kind of thinking about human centeredness and starts to apply to how can we communicate new concepts and create the conditions for change to occur. So, I think just just to take a beat there, because regeneration is a term that I think is a little bit newer to a lot of people and you heard the definition that Doug has given for it, but the way that I think about it is basically doing well, committing to doing well for the planet and people as a business strategy. And if you think about it in context of some of the other terms that we understand like green and sustainability, think about green as kind of mitigating negative impacts, sustainability is getting to you know, net neutral, you know, not doing any worse, but not doing any better. And regeneration is actually moving from an extractive mentality to an additive mentality. And another thing we talked about a lot, which is core to the philosophy is adding value for stakeholders, not just shareholders, and that sounds like a little bit of like corporate talk, but the when you back it up with thinking about how to think about Associates getting education. So we started college um for less than a dollar a day and now it's college free tuition and books for any associate at wal mart. Um and that really helps create this effect throughout communities. Um Another thing is Being in local communities and providing the kind of level of health care. We introduced the $4 generics Um and building facilities donated billion dollars um a year um from the Walmart Foundation to local communities and then it goes on from there. So you heard mentioned before about getting to zero waste by 2025, that's only three years from now. Right in 2030 project gigatons is removing a gigatons of emissions Um with the help of our suppliers, so then it doesn't just become Walmart, the largest company in the world, but all of the suppliers that participate in this help to remove emissions and then finally, 100% renewable by 2035. So it's so huge, it's such an enormous culture change. I mean, Sam Walton's view of the company, his strategy for the company was pretty simple, he articulated it pretty clearly, he was out there to get inputs, every costs including labor costs as low as possible so that he could charge the lowest possible price of the consumers period. It was all about the financial numbers. Now, you're adding all these other stakeholders. You know about taking care of the, the employee and the employee's career and, and taking care of the planet? How do you get an organization that was trained totally on the financials to take? Excuse me, take into account all these other stakeholders? Well, this is this is that the nub of this conversation is that people think you can either and I think it's two fold, you can either have experience or you can have efficiency. You can either have sustainable sustainability or regeneration or a positive business. And what we're saying is that actually all of them have to do with creating efficiency and more sort of a significant and meaningful way to to reach. So they don't conflict know they are actually the same thing. And I even, um, you know, we think about bringing in the concept of regeneration feels like you then become the conscience of the organization. But it's not that you're the conscience of the organization or the conscience of the industry. It's that we, what we're really trying to do is actually create a competitive position Where if we take these actions, we can influence others to take those actions and we have already. And where does design fit in that massive cultural change process. So, we set out back in 2005 with the Katrina reaction and when Walmart was on the cover of every newspaper in 2005 for being on the ground before fema and doing a lot of philanthropic efforts to help New Orleans recover from Katrina. Um that was the beginning of this, this approach and doug re dug our Ceo Doug McMillon kind of re upped the game in saying we should push regeneration. So we're not doing enough. But this philosophy of how can you do good at scale and climate change is real, is the company's position since 2000 and five. So we've done these things in the supply chain, we've done these things with partners, we've done these things in local communities, but the work that we're doing now that design is leading and really helping to reinforce is how do you create the conditions and give associates the tools so that they are able to imagine those futures because there isn't a playbook for the kind of work that we want to do. There is kind of this notion that people have these great ideas. So we're putting, we have re factored all of our design thinking training to be regenerative design thinking where you're not just thinking about building empathy for the individual, but you're really thinking about the individual, the community and the planet every single thing we do and then all of our and we we are, you know, very much um, at the table, we are creating, we have these design sprints and innovation sprints where we are imagining all of the strategic areas of the company, we are articulating through design. We're showing what it would look like and how it would manifest for an associate or a supplier or customer. And then we are bringing those principles of our generation into that so that there's never a chance where you're trying to add something later, but you're actually preemptively doing it last very quick question because everybody in this room is trying to do what you're doing, which is drive change in large organizations using the principles of design thinking, what's your advice? Best piece of advice to them? It has to be a brief one. The first one is bi curious, we're often asked to be the expert, don't be the expert, bi curious. Listen, I'd say the second thing is um, to see the connections and articulate the connections only. We, I think of the design community is especially talented at being able to see things that other people don't see how they fit together. And I think the last thing is around servant leadership, which is a big philosophy of walmart definitely worth reading about if you don't, you don't know this concept, but it is all about enabling people and to the point that was made before about talent and retention, we have to focus on on how people are thinking about their well being, how they think about um, the context in which they live in their happiness and all of those things instead of just saying, hey, there's just lots of people that execute on this plan, so really being more inclusive and leading from behind in a way that is much more supportive and the next day. And then I think we've got great advice, Valerie, Thank you. That was fascinating conversation. Thanks very much.

Presenter: John Maeda, Chief Technology Officer, Everbridge 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: The Secret Relationship Between Resilience And Design

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: The Secret Relationship Between Resilience And Design


until very recently, most corporations were run with a focus on efficiency, meaning there's not a lot of slack in the system when the world is stable, this is a system that works, but rapid or large changes can reveal risks and vulnerabilities as we saw in the pandemic organizations found themselves on the back foot in the face of unprecedented change and the leaders of those organizations had to react as quickly as possible. Technologist and designer, john Maeda suggests, the answer is to leverage design to build resilience, the ability to bounce back and transform the bad news. You can't build resilience without facing and experiencing adversity. The good news Design has a central role to play in building resilience because of its ability to guide us through change in a way that minimizes fear to share his insight into the relationship between resilience and design. Please welcome john Maeda, Chief technology Officer ever bridge. Hi, I uh, we all went through the val Casey moment just now. I'm very moved by it because I've known valve for quite a while when you think about people who have been in design, who have fought for design as a good force, looking for design for good over here, Benedict. Um, but also someone who saw the SDG goals before they came, that's about Casey. So just so we're all aware, I'm not sure of those of you who've known her work. Uh, the fact that she's doing it at the scale of walmart is such a big deal and I say that because when you think about this idea of resilience, it isn't an easy topic because it means that you have had to go through adversity. So que my slide up there. I'm not on a zoom so I can't hit share. Um So for the resilience tech report, what I did is I invited a calligrapher uh to take the word adversity and make it into an am a gram. So if you see it one way it reads adversity and the other way it reads resilience in many senses. Resilient leaders that you meet have gotten there unfortunately through the through the journey of adversity. And one thing I've been thinking a lot about is how design relates to resilience in a very simple way. Um I call this my F. Word thing. Don't worry. It's okay. It's safe for work. But design as we know it is this sort of function and form thing. You know function form. Who had a hard time understanding what the heck form was. Can you raise your hand man. That was hard to understand, wasn't it? Um So function and form together intersection you know baby is designed but when it comes to resilience there's also two other F words. One is flight and the other is fight uh flight is that McGill a the lizard brain saying run away. Bad. Um But there's another response that we have of runaway band but can we kill it instead also not great too. But we know it's built into our system flight or fight and it's how we respond to fear. So we all know, remember when this drawing was created, it made us pretty scary, right? And was like, what is that? I don't like that worked really well. Willie Dunn cbc uh remember when we went out, we put on these masks and like, oh my gosh, what's going to happen? I don't know, right? Let's do it. Right? So we sit too fight instead of sort of hiding. And so flight versus fight is interesting because um, emotional response of us humans, uh, fits into six boxes according to Eichmann's early model. Um, and what I find interesting is there's fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, anger and enjoyment. And if you wonder why you're not happy that much, It's because enjoyment is just 1/6 of the wheels. So it is kind of precious and important in that way, Right? And when you think about it, you know how we love Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Um, I love this a lot because if you think about 56 of the wheel, it goes to the bottom is the safety level and at the very top, uh, is the hedonistic level. But mortality lives at the bottom. Whereas at the very top, we have the fun stuff that what's called Mattering like, hey, I matter kind of thing. And so this very top of the pyramid is where most of design usually gets to sit. Um, but what I wanted to do was go down to this level. The mortality level. It's why I switched into the world of first responder communications and its physical security management to understand what happens at this level. Because you can't be happy if you're not well as we all experience ourselves. So one phrase that I came into by going deep into supply chain, which also val brought up is this phrase by Yosi Shefi at M. I. T. Supply chain center. It's really good. Once you hear it, it like sticks it's be risk averse, not risk averse on a positive for a second. You know be risk versus if you understand risk it becomes less scary, right? Um And so risk averse just means I'm not gonna engage risk first means I'm going to try to understand this and take it on. It's a more courageous ability Now in my looking back at this lower level of mortality pandemic turns out to be a theme that a lot of experts have been talking about. If you look at the World Economic Forum's risk index for the last 25 years. Um pandemic was really big in 2007 and then it went away. Um so for the last 25 years pandemic hasn't gotten to that top level. And as an illustration HBR had a special issue in 2006 on the pandemic at the time early stars and Approed said should a pandemic emerge, it would become the single greatest threat to business continuity and could remain so for up to 18 months pretty good. Huh? Um But the cover story of Hbr Harvard Business review was not the pandemic, It was how to be a great number two because as you know to some that's a little more important. Um but it goes to show how being risk averse made a difference for many companies who were essentially ready now for those of you who are in the risk world or who aren't. Um the risk vocabulary is changing because of the pandemic. It used to be that there's this idea called boom boom occurs and there's what happens before it and after it you have before boom and after boom and what happens is with boom is a boom usually lasts a certain amount of time, how many of you have gone through an earthquake before earthquake, right, earthquake occurs and then a few, it goes away right, Hopefully correct. Um The pandemic is interesting because it came and you were thinking like an earthquake is gonna go away. Um but it turns out that it didn't go away the next day or the next week or the next month and so it lasted as we know for years and so t was very long and then there's the decay constant to that bad thing, it's usually like stomps immediately, but tao keeps sloping on and on and on. And so the idea of being risk averse, it means being aware that there is left of boom and right of boom and you're not sure when boom might end and the pandemic has given us this vocabulary. So I've gone deep into natural hazards because I'm in this field and I'm trying to understand, you know, what should I be afraid of and what should you not? Uh And by being risk averse, I'm much less afraid of all the terrible things that occur. So I hope to give you that knowledge in this short amount of time we are together. First of all, when experts talk about the pandemic, they'll always talk about millions of people dying. It turns out that millions of people die don't die all the time. It's a very rare thing, so if you think about in the last 20 years people didn't die at the scale of millions, Do you know of an earthquake or volcano eruption or something bad occurring a flood, hurricane, whatever. Most times people haven't died that often. Um they die underneath the million dollar mark. But this line is the pandemic, we shot up two million The roughly seven events In the last century that involved people dying in millions. And it turns out that the famous H1N1, what we call the Spanish flu is when 50 million people died. Now, I don't know if you know this, but the flu shot that we get every year is still in place because of that spanish flu, they're all connected And so we're gonna be experiencing this you were experiencing right now and perpetuity in a similar way. Um, but this pandemic is still very odd and it's why wearing a mask makes a good idea because in reality when I took this graph, it was, it was in february or it was in March. That was where the mark was and then, um, one and then it just bumped up in the last three months we lost another million people. So it's a very unusual event, this pandemic, but similar to the spanish flu. Now I'm bringing depressing stuff. I know, but design loves interesting problems. Right? Um, so by understanding hazards, I came to realize something that may be obvious to some of you, but again, I'm giving you things that like, oh my gosh, I knew that, but I didn't know it at all. Uh, first of all, there are six kinds of bad things that happen on earth. Five of them are related to the climate. It's an interesting, so there's the biological stuff, climate, logical stuff that involves hot and cold, geophysical land stuff, neurological stuff. Air stuff and hydrological water stuff. These all are impacted by the climate that's like remember the fear, the kind of emotion thing that's like 56 are to do with the climate, there's also extraterrestrial, which is kind of cool. That doesn't involve aliens. I loved asteroids that's natural hazards nature does that then there is what happens because we're people and we do dumb things to other people or to other things like monuments and things like that. And so this is the sort of the human human caused hazards category. Now I have good news about dying. Um, again, after looking at all this dying stuff, um, this is how we die in general. These are top global causes of death. Do you see these red ones here that are cardiovascular cancer, respiratory, that's like the top four? Um, on the right here, I plotted out how often you die of a car accident. So don't worry, you're not gonna die from that most likely you can die from your heart feeling. So why is that positive? It lets you think of life a little differently? Right. Um, so stepping back whether it's your body or whether it's your your your company or industry, the thing to keep in mind is that um, the before boom and after boom is how you become much more risk averse. And there's a great piece by BCG martin Reeves on the topic. You can like QR code that if you like, It's about a concept called the all weather company. It companies like it's like an all weather tire, it goes through bad things or good things and it sort of still is okay, it's robust and the whole thesis is similar. It's a fact of knowing what happens before during and after and that becomes possible because of course data is available and data in large quantities and to be able to process at high speeds and that's why I'm involved in technology of how do you mitigate disasters, predict them and things like that? Which is I believe it's an important thing to do. Okay. Um so one of the favorite things I've found in my journey of understanding resilience and recognizing that we do all die, remember Heart number one, right. I gotta go jogging. Okay everyone um Heart I found this great piece from London School of Economics on the thing that people say before they die that they wish. And so um you know this this this is a phrase I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself. Not the life others expected of me. That's pretty good. Huh? I have four more of these things that said there. I'd like us to read each one of them together when that shows up. Okay, ready for that? It's really easy. Go. Mm hmm. Mhm, mm hmm. And the last one. So think of that. Well that was 16 of that happy expression. So I think resilience is a topic that is tied to adversity and adversity can be overcome if a little bit happier it turns out. So I wish you all happiness for the rest of this event and thanks for attention. Someone's playing

Jennifer Kolstad, Global Design Director, Ford Motor Company 
In conversation with: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Workplace Reinvention: The New “Office”

Brainstorm Design 2022 -  The New “Office”

we are going to start off with a delving into a pretty huge workplace experiment 100 years ago, the ford motor company's eponymous founder pioneered the five day workweek so that, that was kind of a paradigm until we got always on working and the pandemic just changed everybody's perception and desire about what we should do with the, with the workday. Um last month Ford brought in 25,000 people to embark on an ambitious hybrid work model, blending physical and remote arrangements In preparation. The company reimagined a third of its Michigan office spaces, turning some 3.35 million square feet into collaboration centers. We're going to get into what that means. A central goal is to promote interaction and collaboration of location. So the physical overhaul has been accompanied by rollout of virtual collaboration and digital productivity tools to discuss the thinking behind the project and how workplaces are likely to evolve in the future. We have joining us virtually. Please welcome Jennifer Kolstad, the global design Director, Ford Motor Company. Mm hmm. Hello, jennifer Hi, I am, I am I on screen And what you will now your on screen and you look great. And uh, I should, I should tell everybody that you were gonna be here with us today, but you ran into some nightmare flight cancelation challenges, but you're a trooper. So you're joining us virtually. Um and, and Maryland is joining us to virtually Maryland behind you. Oh, that's oh, she's here. Uh No, we're gonna do this hybrid style ford style. So maybe it worked out. That's right. It's thematically appropriate. So you joined ford in in 2019, I believe? Um you're the Global Design Director. I mean when I, when I hear Ford Global Design Director, I would normally, you know, I think a lot of people think cars, you designed cars, but that's not your background, your your background is in architecture and interior space design. So what was your mission coming in? What's your job as global design Director for? I wrote the role with Jim Hackett, who was the ceo of ford at the time. And um, the ask was really to find somebody who could come in and begin unifying all of our assets globally. And uh, just so you all understand the order of magnitude here, we have almost 200,000 people working for Ford around the world. And so inside of that portfolio, not only do we have industrial and workplace, but we also have hospitality hotels and the whole community districts like michigan central and Detroit, which is a revitalization project. So, and of course retail and, you know, for a long time, we hadn't, we had neglected constructing a red thread, which is really a brand language that would bring all of those assets together and to simply put that with the remit. So when you started that remit, that was ambitious, uh, rethinking everything, but then the whole world changed. Just a few months later, obviously you went through the lockdown the trauma that we all did? And then you had to start reimagining your reimagining. So what was that process like? You know and where was was there a definitive moment when you said okay we're gonna you know wipe off the chalk board and uh we're gonna rethink this you know how did that go? You hear people now saying that Covid was somewhat opportunistic and it was to be real because um you know in spite of the fact that everybody went home in a very untested environment you know we hadn't even tested our I. T. Capabilities and the the entire workforce went home on a friday and went back online on monday. Um we also had our new world headquarters which is the hub of Dearborn campus campus transformation kind of duel going up going up so still on the ground dirt, dug well through schematic design with our architects and then this Covid moment. So we paused the project and did a rethink which led us to a think tank that we called the future of work. But you know we had several projects around the world that we're running and we did exactly that. We just took a minute to catch our breath and deeply think through what the future of work might look like. Not for everybody for us. Yeah. And how did you do that rethink and what did you find and how did the you know what were the big signals that came through the noise of you know everyone's speculating about where this is going to go look, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of head nodding in the room right now. I can't see y'all, but let's see if this tracks with wherever you're from too. I mean, even today we would all say that we don't know what the answer is and what the outcome will be of our new policies. I mean we returned to work what April the third now and we're and we're, you know, looking at our centers and seeing what the metrics are telling us even over a couple of months, anticipating over that over the next 12 everything is going to shift and we'll probably reset again. But you know, at the beginning of this, um, you had to know that this was gonna, we were going into a whole phase of unknown and beta test and the way best to do that is, you know, essentially bring really smart people with you to construct a framework so that you can move through the unknown time frame thoughtfully And for us that was leading with human science first, that's kind of our default when we practice research like design, we just start to fill up with all of the human scientists and scientists necessary to help us think into the problem. And those would be folks like behavioral psychologists, anthropologists, neurologists like, you know, the people who will help you understand the human condition and what potentially might be an outcome. So I just want to remind everybody will have a chance for a couple of questions before the end. But um, so what did you what were the big takeaways from, you know, this discussion, this deep consideration of the human condition? What did you come back and say, okay, this is, you know, now this is how we're gonna these are fundamental principles for designing a flexible but future looking uh work environment. We tried to go a bit deeper than um actually the word flexibility is a great example because, you know, a lot of folks would have carried flexibility into um covid or into our think tank, but what we quickly learned that it's not flexibility and flexibility anymore. Now we're into kind of a state of systemic resiliency, which is more about anticipatory change. Like there's a nuanced shift to thinking through a new definition of the new parameters, flexibility. We can all anticipate and understand that we're potentially better for it. So it's not like it was radical shift, but it was more like shifter or clarifications. Like for example, we talked about wellness before. Now we're really in a state of health equity, which is health and wellness for all. So how do you take an idea like health equity? Um and build that into the work environment and connect that physical environment were the, you know, holistic working environment with behavioral applications. Well, if we just hang on wellness for a second. um, you know, for those of you in the room that our designers, architects and tourists, whatever else. You know, you're, you're familiar with. There are certification strategy like well, um, and that helps us along to a degree. But what we've learned is that um, you know, when you, when you come into a tough moment when we're starting to debate distribution of resources, you really start prioritizing something like health, health equity means that you get around it and you um, you protect it. So for example, in the hub, you know, which is, as I said, was going up and it's still under construction now because of Covid and our agreement that health equity is a priority when we have to shed some of the, you know, the design elements in the building. We now ford say, well this is important to us. We're going to keep the elements that promote healthy living, like, like great facade glazing, you know, that allows natural light to penetrate the depth of the floor plate or like our interior court era and the landscape that goes in them instead of giving that away, which would have been easy to do couple of years ago Now we're going to protect for that stuff. I just want to bring up, we have a few visuals. I just want to look at real quickly. Um, yeah, this is, we're seeing the outside of the hub. Maybe you could just tell us a little of the specifics about this, this massive building and and what's in it, you know, and then we have a couple more slides, which I think, you know about. So you were looking at a two million square foot new headquarters, which will be our new R and D center in dearborn michigan And day one, it's meant to house 6000 bums in seats. So a lot of people are coming together really for the first time ever because if you've been to um, ford campus, it's, it's pretty distributed. In other words, you got people and buildings all over the place and they've not really collaborated or worked side by side before this was really important to Jim Hackett when he kicked off the project before he left we hired a firm called Snohetta to design with us that's Craig Dikkers and his remarkable team and now a firm called I. B. I is taking it across the line, but you can see the glazing on the building in that image that you're looking at right now. And the fact that it's lifted off the ground and there's retail and food and beverage and a bunch of sort of public amenities filling the space as well. I'm trying to, yeah, there's another image of the outside of the hub. Um, and then we have a few images of the experience center. Could you just tell us quickly, uh, what the essence of the experience center is like the experience center is actually, it's just finished, it opened january and that's like our think of it as our pilot to the hub, it really is a co lab center, so we've tested some ideas, some, some were designed for a couple of years ago and some precipitated as a result of covid like placement of technology and the fact that we have a lot of folks participating uh you know like I am right now coming in from other locations like Chennai or san paolo or wherever and so that really had us go back and reevaluate our technology package, but um this is our experience center and um it's you know, it's designed for our dealers for learning and development for our external customers and if you come to Dearborn please come by and have a look, so if you have a question, stick your hand up and we'll get a mic to you, um we have mike handlers in the room um but jennifer, I want to ask you, so you you mentioned getting people back in in april and starting to implement this and you know, see the results in real time and interactions. So first of all, how did you uh communicate? Uh you know, we're coming back into this new space and then what are you starting to see early on as people are beginning to experience it. Um This was an immense communication effort, let me tell you and a lot of teaching about um what I mean, starting with what is collaboration? Um how to balance your time, How to work with your people leader? I mean some people I learned I didn't appreciate really needs some um structure to their day, you know, to understand what focused time is versus collaborative time and how to use their buildings. And so we took the better part of a year teaching that out globally and now we're going to really see the fruits of that labor. We're seeing already that the collaboration centers are being used. But you know, let's say a week ago the CDC recommended masks go back on, we did that and statistically uh you know, the population of our centers declined immediately. And that's not a bad thing. It means that people are making the choices needed to uh you know, to be comfortable and safe themselves and to work in a in a way that's most productive for them. You can tell people don't like working with maths on, so they're staying home. So uh my understanding is that a huge portion of this space, the new space you've designed like 75% is common collaborative space. Um You know, we all have like a lot of debate about kind of uh you know, shared office space before the pandemic. Then it all took on a new meaning. So what do you what do you what kind of feedback are you getting in terms of different groups of employees? Is there a generational divide? Uh is there one group of people who like this more and and how do you measure as you go forward? The productivity, is it more productive in this environment than you know, the old environment? Um It's difficult for me to answer that question directly because we have so many skilled teams and so many people, it's gonna take a while for us to gather the data for me to be able to give you that answer. But what you're asking about really is a demographic and psychographic analysis um and how people are responding to their environment. Um I think this will end up being more skilled team based for example, like ford credit has typically had more about, you know, quiet focused office type space. But then we have other skilled teams who have always worked in open studio format. And so I think what we're going to see is some clashing between our skilled teams. So I mean this is going on at the same time that Ford Motor itself is going through this massive transformation of, you know, splitting the company into two divisions, the the forward looking electric vehicle, you know, business and and sort of the legacy uh car and truck company. How did you weave that into what you're doing? Is that, is, do you make a distinction between the businesses or do you, you know, put everybody in together for the moment together because our collapse centers are meant to just be kind of like taken on and used and abused by skilled teams, Like I'm like, I'm describing to you, but you know, if model e needs to have run a design sprint, which they did a week ago um, as a group, they'll claim a space like a lot of space and then take it for, you know, a few weeks to run their sprint and then they'll kind of disperse again and then another team will come in and use it and that's how it's meant to be used. So it's not assigned necessarily, but you know, it can be taken and really, um, you know, worked in for a duration. Great, well, there's a lot of exciting things happening in Dearborn. Um I'd love to get out there and see it. I'm sure people in the room would too, thanks so much for joining us. It was, it was great to hear about what you're doing and good luck. And uh we look forward to hearing the results of this big experiment. Thank you. Have a great session, everybody. All right, thank you

Rachael Dietkus, Founder, Social Workers Who Design
In conversation with: Jason Mayden, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing Workplace Wellness

the importance of addressing trauma has often been overlooked or misunderstood over the turbulent past few years, centered around the global pandemic are cumulative trauma load has increased now as more people are returning to the office, it is more pressing than ever to overhaul toxic design workplaces and address workplace trauma. Social workers with their capacity to address a person's entire environment can help designers adjust their transactional approach to be more relational in their empathy as we look to close gaps in human centric design. Should designers think more like social workers to explore this intersection and explain the benefits of trauma informed design please welcome Rachel Dickus, founder of social workers who designed in conversation with fortune brainstorm design co chair Jason maiden. Mm hmm. All right, thank you guys for attending and being awake and everything I know after you eat, sometimes you get a little bit tired. We're here. Um first and foremost, thank you Rachel for being here. There's a strong midwest contingency in the building, so I just want to shout her out, She's from Illinois. But before we get started, I think it's important that we model a lot of your work by me asking how are you right now in this moment? How are you saying? How am I right now in this moment? Well, um, I wondered if you were going to ask this question, I have to say um even before you told me that you're gonna ask this question, I think I think I have to say I'm I'm almost certain that I'm probably the only social worker in the room and I think being a being someone who is working so closely and and adjacent to design constantly is uh is interesting and fascinating, but I often am the only social worker in the room and so there's uh there's an excitement with that but there's also a bit of a extreme nervousness that comes with that too. So um I feel like um uh Maisie Williams when she was on jimmy Fallon, remember when she like the april Fools and she started quivering. So that's what I am on the inside center ourselves. It is and we're back. So I think the intersection of social work and design is exceptionally important for people to understand. Would you mind walking us through like how that came to be and what do you mean by specialty of trauma informed design. So for me, I actually started out as an art design student many, many years ago, you know, back in the early nineties. And so uh things shifted for me when I took a sociology class and so I decided like, oh I can I can do design on the side, I can, I can be uh you know a fan but what where I was really passionate with understanding systems and people and how people are affected by systems and systems of harm as well. Um but throughout my social work career I was constantly working very closely with engineers. Architects designers actually worked um on construction projects at veterans affairs for a couple of years and and so I saw this this perfect um integration and intersection of where you could actually like live your values and do something of purpose while addressing immediate needs. But really trying to have those wraparound services to really try to eradicate like why you even need those needs in the first place. So uh it really just became this evolution of how can I be also a social worker who is participating in design but also actively be a designer as well. So tell me a little bit more about that because what you just explained is you're immersing yourself you know through empathy and observation but you're also able to step back and observe the context. Like what is that process like being immersed in it exposed to it but didn't happen to step back and synthesize it all. Well I appreciate what you said about context because I think context is a is critical and everything that I do as a designer as a social worker designer. But I think context is also a big piece and a big component of just how I define like trauma and what it means to be trauma responsive and design. Um you know there are there well entrenched trauma informed care principles that are created by the federal government here in the US but I like using this language of trauma responsiveness because it has this action component with it. It's the same thing for me. Like I um I made a made a comment at the lunch that that I actually had a degree in empathy because I'm a social worker. So for those who caught that, but I actually I shy away from the word empathy because I think it's it's missing that action component. And so I really doubled down on compassion. So like what does it mean to be compassionate when we're doing design? What does it mean to be full of care when we're doing design as opposed to just human centered and design. Again, those aren't bad things. But how can we, how can we flipped some of the language or use different language of actually is going to allow us to go far deeper in these processes and who were designing with or for a phenomenal and I think what's critically important is that we define trauma for some of us, trauma is a DJ from Atlanta or it's a lived experience depending on where you grew up. But I think for this audience specifically, like how would you define trauma? So there are, there are a lot of different, a lot of different definitions of trauma and there are many clinical and medical definitions and uh you know those I'm not going to share, I'm going to share one that I think is has I have um used and I've pulled from uh from from people who are just well known in in trauma trauma work and also in uh social work and trauma studies, but it's a combination of work from dr Bethel Vander Kolk who wrote the body keeps the score resume, Niccum who wrote my grandmother's hands and then Corinne Bell, who is a somatic abolitionist. And so it's a combination of of what these three have really like said that I feel like really embodies what we could be in. Well we could be in design about how we can also understand what this means, the design. So between the three of them, um your trauma is a response to anything that happens too much too fast or too soon. And but you know, because often that's where the definition starts and stops, but and it's coupled with this lack of protection or support. So you had an event or a series of events occur, but you didn't have someone to talk with, you didn't have someone who was there to support you to uh you know, make sure that you were okay. And then the third component, which I think is also often like left out is that the context is crucial. So what may be a traumatic experience for me may not be a traumatic experience for you and vice versa. So, you know, these elements of identity, intersectionality, position al Itty, these are all crucial and part of that, those components of what it means to be, what, how I would define trauma, what it means to be trauma responsive that is phenomenal and I think what's critical about what you said, if you guys haven't read the book, the body keeps the score, it is life changing when you understand physiologically what trauma does to you. So within the context of the design centric organization um you have a statement, you say trauma in the design centric organization is so unsettling, can you want to pack what that means? I think the you know, maybe I'll maybe what one of the things that I can share is that when I started doing this work and being much more explicit on, I want to I don't want to choose design or social work, I want to find a way to integrate the two. So I don't want to I don't know what the name is for the integration of both disciplines, which is why I often say I'm a social worker designer. Um but I think the thing that I initially started seeing was that you know, I started wondering about was that designers need to be trauma informed, like why are we not trauma informed and we're designing with or for or allowing others to to design you know, their own solutions. Um and the more I started digging into that work, what was becoming very evident very quickly was that designers themselves are often extremely traumatized by the design process by the pace and the speed at which we are expected to be working and you know throughout industry and then um so so there's the there's that element of the trauma, but then there's also significant secondary or sometimes called vicarious trauma that designers are experiencing because of what they're hearing. So when you're so think about when, when designers are doing research and there talking to individuals and you're working at this pace where you're going back to back to back like our body can only consume and and absorb so much and it's going to go somewhere and it's going to tell us things if we don't have a release or a way to to express that. You know, it's one of the reasons why a lot of designers um have openly and you actively tell me that, you know, I have a have a great supportive network, I'm in therapy, but they, but they don't necessarily have someone who can help them navigate both the design system and also um just live their work in a different way and and it's the work is emerging, you know, so I could say like um like this is what I do, like I can maybe like tally off like the things that I do, but I feel like a lot of it is it comes up by definition of what designers are working on, what may be the topics that they're working on. Um but the design is trying to uh design his historically, but also has been getting much more involved in what I would call serious and complex social justice issues and are not and we absolutely are not prepared to handle some of those complexities of the situation and that that is, you know, an exceptionally important point because one could argue we've just experienced, we're currently experiencing a mass traumatic experience that will affect us inter generationally and you know, in the field of study of epigenetic people talk about how trauma can be hard coded into our DNA predispose us to certain elements. Like are you starting to see bodies of research or initiating bodies of research to think about the generational impact of this shared experience that we're currently living in? You know, I think I think the people are researching this absolutely. Um I think one of my first key insights into the longevity of what the what this collective experience has been. So not just covid not related to the pandemic, but all of the other things that are related to that, you know, I mean, you're a parent, I'm a parent, you know, I have my southwards and healthcare, it's like we have like the trifecta. I worked in a toxic workplace, toxic design workplace, I was a working parent and I had a spouse who's working who is a critical care nurse and so exposed to covid constantly. So, you know, I think about the um like what are what are the things that we can that we can do on a small community scale that can then um possibly like fan out. And I think it ultimately comes down to how are we forming connections? So I've heard a lot about like relationships. I mean I even I just made I made a note of a few things that have been said. So words like trust, relationships, change ecosystem um you know, connection, resilient success, human needs, transformation all those things mean something completely different to me as a social worker. Designer completely different. Like and and I don't know if that's I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing but when I hear some of that language, I think about like what is the language that we're using and how are we using that to to really like change course on how we do design. And that's such a great point because we've seen over the past three years, a lot of great performative marketing to address some of the societal ills that we're all currently facing. And a very I would say you know, personal topic that's happening within the black design community is we're expected to show up at work and still perform at a high level and still deal with the nuances of being underrepresented in certain instances while still facing the reality of seeing things that happen in Buffalo, seeing things that happened civil arrests same thing for other demographics of designers who are underrepresented. So for the people in the room who are leaders? How do you suggest they brush those difficult topics with the employees that they know are suffering? But they don't know how to reach them because there's gonna be a mass exodus of people consistently if we don't, you know, attack it from that perspective. Yeah. This is this is a it's a tough question and and it needs a far longer to answer than the one minute and 45 seconds we have right in front of us here. Um I will say I I think that if if we think that we can manufacture care, I think that's going to be the wrong answer. Like we have to find ways to actually build true human connection. I mean it's um and I I don't think I do think it does. Um I think leadership is part of that. I don't think it's always necessarily starts with leadership. I think like everyone has people on their teams and they are telling you in both explicit and implicit ways like how they are suffering. I mean, I just I think about the volume of of grief, of trauma that we're all always swimming in. And I think the longer that we suppress that and that we don't acknowledge that the longer this is going to continue, it will be a different kind of a pandemic. And with that, I mean, how do you see the future shaping for responsible design And we have this information. We have the tools we have the moment where people can be emotionally and you know from a capital perspective invested in to take action. So what do you see the future of your work becoming as more people become aware of this type of this type of design? Yeah, I um I'm not gonna lie, I would love to see, I would love to see every single company here like have a team of social workers and not just hire them as therapists but hire them as social workers who are also designers because there it is a tiny but mighty like growing field of interest. Um I would say one other thing is that um you know it's not enough just to be trauma informed, trauma responsive. It's also like how can we be healing focused and how can we be care centered as well? Um I think that statement right there is the perfect way to end this session. I want to thank you Rachel fishermen. It's work, I encourage you all to follow what you're doing. Thank you for your time. Thanks

Krista Donaldson, Chief Executive Officer, Equalize Health 
In conversation with: Kristen Bellstrom, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing Our Way To Health Equity 

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Health Equity 



Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing Our Way To Health Equity 


new medical devices are seldom designed to be low cost and accessible. Equalized health is upending that paradigm and their innovative products are reducing health inequities around the world set up as a non profit charity equalizes focused on providing medical technology for everyone. Its products include a sweet photo therapy devices that treat severe jaundice which could be fatal to infants. Nearly 1.5 million patients worldwide have been treated with equalized products Of whom some 1.2 million would not be other not otherwise have had access to effective treatment. Let's turn out Equalized, maintains a relentless patient focus and delivers on the promise of design for social impact. With that. I would love to welcome to the stage Krista Donaldson, the chief executive Officer of Equalized Health in conversation with fortune. Executive editor Kristen Bell strong. Thank you. Mhm Welcome Krista. Thank you. Um So we we got a little bit of this and in the intro but I just like to start by having you know in your own words like what is the mission of Equalize health. Our mission is to create health technologies for everyone. And I know when we talk about medical devices are often thinking about our own experiences and hospitals here and I'm gonna show a few pictures soon. But if you think about low income areas in all parts of the world and health conditions that aren't being treated about like for example, 90% of babies when we started on the photo therapy project didn't have access to jaundice treatment, which is kind of crazy if you think about it's something we don't even think about here in the US and we're going to dive in. But I was just personally was was interested in your background because let's see, tell me if I get this right, you have a master's in product design and a PhD in mechanical engineering. Uh what I don't here and there is a global health anything. So um what was your what your journey? I think like so many people who work in health, I don't know how many people here work in health. Okay. Yeah, I I came in, my dad was a doctor, my mom was a social worker to Rachel, I really appreciate what you say and I kind of avoided all that stuff and then of course I found my way there and I found my way there originally equalized health was called which is short for design revolution and we had health products and um the more I dug in the more I was like this is such an area that needs design. Um and I think coming from mechanical engineering where things felt very concrete medicine was so interesting because it was more, it was an art, it was like science, it was all these different things coming together but such an opportunity to bring patient centered thinking like figuring out who the stakeholders are, who's the decision maker and how all that comes together and creating solutions and uh you're a nonprofit which you know, there are many medical device makers. Um, but obviously you're filling some sort of need that is not being filled by those companies. So why do you feel like why is nonprofit the approach for, for the kind of work that you do? You know the first thing I'll say is um, we are structured as a nonprofit. We have um a private limited in India and we're setting up one in kenya, but we like to say that we, we act like a regular medical device company except for our currency is impact. Um, we raise philanthropy for the R and D and then we can develop the product and they go to market. Um, we're searching as a nonprofit for a couple of reasons though. We are focused on problems that the typical for profit MedTech industry doesn't necessarily have the financial incentive to address, particularly in the design and development of products and what we're finding like from the design side raising the philanthropy to do really good user market research. It enables us to really dig in and understand the context. The last thing I'd add is that um, you know, compared to many medical device companies where you know, you have competition, we actually like competition. If we see for example more high quality, affordable, I don't like to say low cost, affordable photo therapy devices in rural Uttar Pradesh India. We're doing a good job because we want to see competition coming in. We want to see healthcare workers around the world have choice and we know that we're not going to be the only ones to provide that. Okay I think you have a slide that gives us a sense of where you work. Yes I do. Okay. There we go. So um our products are sold in 79 countries. Um you can see uh we mostly most of our market is in India, our largest offices in New Delhi and followed by the East African region. Um but if you can see we have sales across the world, largely low and middle-income countries. Mhm. Um and you touched on this already but you know these are not products that are going to like Mount Sinai, these are products that can be used in very specific types of um you know, caregiving hospitals and other places in in all these different countries. Uh So so give us a sense of like what what are the types of environments you're designing for and how does that affect how you look at the problem. Yeah. So we're really looking at where there's health disparities and where um where there's solutions that are needed. Um and in many cases the technology and the know how already exist but they're just not reaching some of these facilities. So you're looking at a photo here from a large hospital in Uganda. Um And just to point out a few things there, you can see it's overcrowded and that's what we've seen. So many of the hospitals that we work in, which is very different. I mean we had overcrowding here, we've got a real lesson with Covid, but this is the norm in many of the hospitals we work and if you look closely, I appreciate that John Maeda talked about respiratory distress is like the third area because that's an area we work as well. But if you look at these photos, the babies are actually sharing lines to CPAP device into oxygen. And this is how this hospital is addressing the need for respiratory support for babies. So let's take a look at some of what you've designed. What I thought I would do is share some design insights particularly around health equity and some of the lessons learned. So the first one we didn't talk about, which was part of my introduction is photo therapy. So photo therapy is blue light to treat severe neonatal jaundice in this case. Um when we started digging into the problem um no, 10 years ago, uh cost was an issue. And I think when people think about health equity, they often think like, oh it's just the devices need to be more affordable and that's true, but it's not just affordability and in fact what we typically see in this is a photo from a hospital um in Karnataka India, what we typically see is a medical device that has been designed for here or for europe and it's been de featured to make it more affordable and then sold in other markets. Um So when we dug in and really try to understand users markets everything related to photo therapy, we saw scenes like this. So does anyone know why this photo therapy devices not that effective? I just gave you a hint in the last slide. Yes, the fluorescent light but it's white light. Um and the blue light is what provides the treatment for severe jaundice and some of your will say, oh yeah, well white light has blue light in it but it's not intense enough to provide the treatment, but this is actually quite typical for what we see. So yes, someone said there's burned out bulbs and that's right. There's real supply chain issues around replacement bulbs for photo therapy. They're very expensive in India. You'd see them from like 12 to $20 per bald. Um Oops, can we go back a slide? I think I accidentally hit it. Um 12 to $20 in Kampala Uganda, they were almost $200 per bulb. And these are bulbs that need to be replaced every 3 to 6 months. You can imagine very quickly. It's not just the cost of the device but it's the operating costs. And so we were seeing this sort of scene over and over again if the facility even had a photo therapy device. So the first kind of aspect of design for health equity is really run designed for serviceability and so this is really what that's about. And the device we designed used L. E. D. S. So L. E. D. S. As many of you know last a really long time and in fact they last about seven years before they start to diminish a little bit beef. And also designed for that. Um Second insight is related to respiratory support. So we have a neonatal CPAP device who's familiar with CPAP. Yeah many people know about it because it's for COPD um particularly as we get on in our years but it is respiratory distress is the major killer of premature babies globally. Um and to give you a sense cpap for neonatal has been around for 50 years but yet it's still the major killer. When we dug into this problem. It was really interesting and I mentioned about how devices are G featured and sold into lower income areas. And this is really true with CPAP. Um As we did our user research though, what we found is it was an issue of staffing. So CPAP they're designed assuming there's one nurse per baby or one nurse for two babies. And that's typically what the device expects or the designers expect. But um in India and many of the other places we work it's one nurse per eight babies, one nurse per 10 babies. And you can imagine with a critical care device the device can't do they can't behave the same way it would necessarily if there's a nurse hovering around so we did a couple of things um with with this device and actually I should just point out in this photo. So some of the ways that hospitals manage it when they don't have access to affordable, affordable CPAP is will make homemade devices and this is actually a homemade CPAP device. You see a drainage bag at the bottom and that's actually how the pressure is set with the baby. They put a tube down into water and that sets the pressure that the baby is receiving which you can imagine is not great. Right? Can I ask you questions? So um do you look at those homemade devices to help inform? Thinking about like what works in this particular environment? Yeah. And in fact when we see how many devices I'm like wow this is really a high priority in this hospital. Right? Because if if clinicians are at a point where they are designing or getting someone to design a device, this is like a huge need. Right? 11 interesting side note to about your question um with bubble CPAP we designed a flow driven CPAP which means that there's a fan that drives the pressure um as compared to bubble which is the tube but so many clinicians were used to the bubbling that we actually considered a fake bubbler on our CPAP because that's what they expected in the end. We didn't go with it. But um that was interesting learning. Um this is just a quick picture of the CPAP. One thing I'll just mentioned with nurses were recognizing nurses were under so much stress, there's a lot of turnover. So our device is very clear on, you know, the settings like the oxygen, you know, starts to diminish. It alerts you, the nurse doesn't have to think so much. It says like oxygen. Um please please address. Um The other thing too is that there's instructions on it and that's because we saw such high nurse turnover and it was dependent on training, training being able to use it whereas if it's on the device as an option then the device can train the nurse. Um The last thing I just mentioned on this particular device is um many medical devices make a lot of money off of proprietary consumable. So you know, the tubes that you need for each patient. And we saw that that was a real barrier to health equity in this sense that we'd see functioning CPAP sitting for example in a rural hospital in Rwanda, but they didn't have the right consumables to go with the C path. So the device was sitting there. So with our device, we designed it to take any type of consumable. So I would say the lesson kind of coming out of this um example is really around designing what for reality as compared to what we think should be. And I think, you know, this aspect of there not being enough nurses is something in healthcare. We don't design enough for. Um, and I think your final, this is the final example is the maternal well trained also, maternal trade. Yeah. So the last example I wanted to give around health equity is that we've started to work with local innovators who have great ideas and these are often doctors or nurses or repair people. And so the maternal well trade, which you're looking at is for postpartum hemorrhage. So when women start to bleed after giving birth and this is the major killer of women globally, um, at birth. Um, but it was developed by this incredible doctor in South Africa who works in Botswana, but he has dedicated his life to saving women's lives. And so he had this idea, but he's not someone who can, you know, design a product, get through regular regulatory control, find a commercial partner, figure out all the distribution that we've partnered with him. And we're really excited because this device is going to come to market later this year. And what it is, is it just measures blood loss after birth because so often doctors are eyeballing the blood loss and if you slow blood loss or there's chaos during the delivery, which very often happens. Um, the attention goes away from the mom and the and the bleeding and you can lose the mom. Yes. Just let me just add one. Yeah, sorry. From, from a, from a health equity standpoint though. I think the last kind of point is, is being able to co design with innovators who are on the front lines. Uh, I wanted to ask you, you know, I'm sure you go into a lot of these situations and there are so many needs um how do you decide? This is what we're going to address? This is the place, we feel like we can make a difference. How do you make that decision? So we so care about what people are saying other problems. So I had a former Minister of Health and Rwanda say please work on CPAP and at the time we were like no, there's other devices out there, but we kept hearing about it. We actually had one doctor, I'm in a rural area who asked us for CPAP and he had been trained on CPAP had trained in Belgium and I asked him how do you, how do you care for babies now? And he said, I only pray for them. So we, we look we look to see where it's a problem, We work on problems that are global in scale and our team does due diligence in all different types of markets and then if it's a global problem and we think we can solve it will work on it. Um Thank you so much Crystal, that was Matthew, thanks everyone


Presenter: Antionette Carroll, Founder, President, and CEO, Creative Reaction Lab


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: Designing With Humility 

Brainstorm Design - 2022 Designing With Humility



Presenter: Antionette Carroll, Founder, President, and CEO, Creative Reaction Lab



Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: Designing With Humility


social entrepreneur and equity designer Internet Carroll believes that because inequities were created by design, they can be dismantled by intentional design. The creative reaction lab she founded is focused on building a youth led community centered movement to design racially equitable communities. Empathy has long been viewed as central to community building efforts, reflecting on her own experience with equity centered community design. Internet highlights the importance of humility and redesigning for inclusion. In our next design talk. We will explore how humility as well as vulnerability can help us iterate our way to a more equitable communities and workplaces. Please welcome to the brainstorm design stage Antoinette Carroll, founder president and ceo of Creative reaction lab. What? Hi George. Hi everyone, how are you today? Give me a little bit more. How are you today? All right. So by show of hands, how many people in here believe that empathy is a core component of design, interesting now, also by show of hands, how many people in here believe that designers are experts of empathy. Finally, a truthful room. So today I'm here to talk about how not only do we need empathy and the work that we do, but we also need that one word. We don't use a lot humility. Now, I'm going to challenge your idea of humility because most of the time we think about it through the lens of being humble, but I'm gonna push you a little bit further than that. So most of the spaces I go into, people no matter what industry say that they are the experts on empathy. You can put any creative profession in that space. You can obviously put any profession in that space. And they will say we are deeply empathetic how many people in this room by short hands believe that we all have figured out empathy. Okay. Design observer did an article a few years ago and which it says empathy, you must know by now is a major key word in the design business. We empathize with our clients, we empathize with their employees and their customers. We empathize with outside experts and with humanity. Now I don't know about you but I didn't study empathy in design school. So it's something that I didn't realize was part of the curriculum and there's also something that I haven't really heard people talk about doing accountability lens. Usually I hear people talk about empathy as just a word. But how do we push beyond that? So my company is creative reaction lab I found it in response to the uprising in Ferguson in 2014. Yes, we've had the racial reckoning in 2020 but I will let you know it started before that. And so my company has been around for eight years and in these eight years we have done a lot of work. We have really tried to change people's mindset and have them understand that any system produces what it was designed to produce. We talked about how design is everywhere. And yet I have seen many articles, many comments in which they say well that's not my company. We would never do that. That's not my country. We would never do that because too many times we have not recognized that all of these things have been by design, we like to say it but we again don't hold ourselves accountable to it. So what do I mean by design? We all have our different definitions. I'm a big proponent of language setting. If you don't do language study in your community and your workspaces, I encourage you to do so because we've all had different perspectives in our lives. We've all received a variety of messaging. Believe me I used to work in advertising marketing. We got paid to tell you what to do But the definition I used actually IBM thank you was built off IBM 1960s definition. So they define design at that time as the intent behind an outcome. I have since expanded that and said intention is not enough. We also need to think about design as the intent and impact behind an outcome. How do we hold both in our space? So with that I look at the impacts of our society, I look at the systems of oppression, inequality inequity and I recognize that not only are they by design that also means that they can be redesigned. We don't have to passively navigate life and think that well this is just what it is because people like us have designed these systems, we navigate and also every single one of us in this room actually play a role in this redesign. So creative reaction. Last mission is to educate, train and challenge black and latino excuse to become leaders in designing healthy and racially equitable communities. So in this space I don't actually have to answer the question. What does that mean? Because I get it all the time. What does that look like? But you may also be asking why am I in front of you if I do work with young people? Well once I want to remind you you started off pretty young. I also want to let you know that we actually have a racial bias as early as six months old according to data. So think about the bias is not just racial but all the biases we've had throughout our lives and we have now but also my work isn't just with young people. We actually are building an intergenerational movement of a new type of leader that we call re designers for justice and in that we are changing the way people are addressing systemic oppression. Now this could be at a larger viewpoint of society but this also can be within our works workspaces. This is within our communities. This is also within our homes because some of us you might not want to admit it here avoid certain conversations in our house because we don't want to make someone uncomfortable or we just don't want to deal with it. But all of those moments, our design opportunities and we have to recognize them as such. But I'm going to let you know that being human center, it's not enough because unfortunately many of us look at humanity whether we want to admit it or not, as if we're on a cartoon strip and we're looking at humanity in that one moment of time, we're looking at humanity and that one problem at a time or that one project at a time or that one agenda at a time, that one initiative. We're not looking at everything else that affects people when they show up in the space because I don't know about you, my trauma doesn't go away just because I'm prototyping that shows up with me and so do my biases. So my company pioneered a new form of creative problem solving called Equity center Community design. And in this process we built upon more quote unquote traditional design frameworks, but we actually have pushed us to think about how do we invite diverse co creators? How do we also build our humility to ultimately become empathetic and how do we also recognize the role of history and healing and the role of power dynamics and all the spaces in which we work because throwing some post it notes on a sheet on a sheet of paper and on the table that's not addressing power and that's what we need to be very mindful of. So I'm just going to focus on one if you want to learn more about our process. We have field guides outside for free. You can take them. We also have them on our website for free download. But the one area I want to focus on today is building humility and empathy. So when we talk about building humility and empathy, we are talking about how do we unpack our biases are unseen, areas are power are privileged and the spaces that we navigate in the spaces that we work. Now when I talk about empathy, I am talking about the ability to understand and share the feelings of another and we talked about it as if it's something easy to do. But I've been married almost 18 years and I still find it hard to sharing feelings of my husband. I'm just like something wrong with him. Okay, so if I'm struggling at a personal level and I'm deep in this work, imagine what we are doing is multiple people in the room or as multiple spaces were navigating empathy is not just about the words, it's about the action, but empathy alone is not enough to shift power sustain inclusive and accountable businesses because we all talk about inclusive design today and ultimately it's not enough to redesign systems. We need humility Now, most people when they think about humility, they think about becoming humble now I will name for some communities, I would argue that needs to happen more. But I would also argue in some communities such as being a black woman in the United States of America, I need to actually amplify what I do because too many times I've been erased throughout history. So it's not just about being humble, it's not just about measuring your importance, it's about more than that. So if you are ultimately saying, okay, I am empathetic, but you haven't unpacked your humility, then ultimately it's about you. So empathy without humility means that you remove yourself an equation. You're not actually holding yourself accountable or what role you played in the situation. You think that intention equals impact. I can't tell you how many times I hear, but I have the best intentions. But what about the impact you justify certain things occurring. And we can see that in many spaces whether we talk about police brutality, we talk about xenophobia, we talked about homophobia, all these things that happened, there's usually a justification on why something was Okay. Also, it shows up its judgment, a colleague of mine in the Missouri History Museum because you know, I got represented ST louis who and my midwest folks where y'all at. She says that humility asked us to step outside of ourselves. Listen and absorb someone else's truth. Even if it makes us feel defensive and I would argue, especially if it makes you feel defensive. Okay, you got your shot. Alright. But if empathy has humility, then it's ultimately about us. Whenever they have humility, it requires vulnerability. We always talk about how we need more trust, but we don't take the time to build at the speed of trust. We always have the agenda to build up. The speed of trust means that you have to leave by being vulnerable, but we've been told that we shouldn't do that or it will make us be viewed as less powerful. I'm here to tell you that it's not the case because the important component of that is consistency. If you show up is vulnerable in this one situation and after that, I don't see it anymore, then it was performative and it was about you. Empathy with humility also means discomfort. If you are always centering your comfort, that means you are always excluding other people's comfort. And we usually learn at the margins. It means learning and unlearning together, acknowledging the role we all play in a situation, this scenario and a mission and accountability of sharing and shifting power because we are all responsible for sharing and shifting power. So what does privacy empathy? What humility looks like? I couldn't just say this and then not give you anything because then I'm pretty much being a hypocrite. So what does it look like? It means holding space versus offering advice or critiquing their perspective, not just oh I have an open door policy. Well if I have never felt like I was heard in the space in which we work with everyone else, why would I want to be alone with you? We need to move a little bit more understanding that you can't fully know someone else's experience. You are the living expert of your own life. You cannot pretend to know someone else's. You can't say well if if I was in that situation or if I had that project, I would have done x, y and Z because you've had different experiences than that person and it's not saying that your experiences are better at saying that our experiences are different and that's why we need to co create together is allowing discomfort and processing space and not just saying we want to have safe spaces, but we want to have brave and accountable spaces because it's not enough to just show up with bravery, but then someone be harmed through microaggressions and then we don't hold them accountable for creating that harm and that someone could be you, that someone could be me, we need to hold ourselves accountable as well. It's acknowledging that intent does not equal impact. No matter what they say and no matter how easy it is to say it, it's checking for understanding because again, the way that you understand something may not be the way that they understand something is building in metrics and organizational time for conflict checkpoint. You see me saying organizational time, that means we need to allocate resources and investments around this and if you have caused harm sit in it, sit in that discomfort before you automatically rush to apologize or to fix something, sit in it and think about what can I do differently? So it doesn't continually happen. And then explore your actions internally and with the people that have offered support and make sure you get consent. So I'm going to leave you with this quote to think about in this space today. In the spaces we're all in, we usually hear about diversity equity inclusion a lot. But the whole notion of diversity equity inclusion does not happen simply because there is a policy in place, but it happens because individuals taken upon themselves to lead change both internally within themselves and were in relation to one another as an organization. Thank you rita for that accountability accountability measure. And I am looking forward to us all building our humility together. Thank you. Mhm

Paul Papas, Managing Partner, IBM Consulting Americas  
Brian Rice, Senior Vice President, Chief Brand and Design Officer, 3M  
In conversation with: Kate Aronowitz, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Building Trust And Empathy Through Design 

Paul Papas, Managing Partner, IBM Consulting Americas  
Brian Rice, Senior Vice President, Chief Brand and Design Officer, 3M  


 Building Trust And Empathy Through Design 


Paul Papas, Managing Partner, IBM Consulting Americas  
Brian Rice, Senior Vice President, Chief Brand and Design Officer, 3M  



Brainstorm Design 2022 - Building Trust And Empathy Through Design 


Gwen Schantz, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Brooklyn Grange 
Laura Katz, Founder and CEO, Helaina 
In conversation with: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Reimagining How (And What) We Eat

Slava Balbek, Ukrainian Architect; Founder and CEO, Balbek Bureau 
In conversation with: Jason Mayden, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design


Brainstorm Design 2022 - The View From A Warzone

So let's get to our first session, Central design principal is, and purpose is to solve people's problems as Ukraine fights for survival. One of the country's other challenges is how the shelter, the tens of thousands whose homes have been destroyed or damaged by Russian forces Baalbek Bureau, a Kiev based architecture studio has a practical solution, a wood frame modular housing system called re Ukraine. The intent is to provide dignified temporary shelter for those who've been sleeping in schools or metro stations and displaced from their homes. After meeting with the studios head President Zelinski suggested its first rollout being near the devastated towns of boudicca and her pin on the outskirts of the capital live from Kiev. We're joined by Slava Baalbek, the founder and Ceo of the Baalbek studio. Please welcome him to brainstorm design in conversation with Jason maiden fortune, brainstorm design. Co chair. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. This is the most longest dramatic walk from that side of the stage here. Slava. Good to see you. How are you? Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. But first and foremost, thank you for taking time out of your day to join us. We are immensely grateful for your presence. And so before we jump in, I want to see, how are you? How are you doing? How's your family? How's the studio? Just just give us an update on what's happening right now. Thanks. Thanks for the question right now. I'm in key. Who's my family, there is more less safe and keep right now, the city filling up with the with the citizens, the people getting back to the business. It's according to Kiev. But as for me, I'm continuing working at the volunteer in our food hub. We are making the daily meals and then continue working with my social project was my big girl. It's wonderful. Wonderful. Now we're here to talk about re Ukraine. Um, the modular housing system that you created for the displaced population. That's in Kiev. What does what what compelled you to decide to pursue this project? So quickly after the invasion began. Yes, we we started working on this project at 10 March while I was advocating my family, my my my wife and my daughter to the Western part of Ukraine because it was more safe. And then I just realized that the problem and the priority of the problematic with this world is the refugees is the people who is temporarily placed. Because I actually by myself, I couldn't find the recommendation for a while and then it's a huge problem. People are living in the gyms, people are living in some shelters. So that's how I just get to the point that we need to propose something. How can we solve this project? How the temporary living can be remain dignity way of life. And this is the main aim. Now, what's tremendously fascinating about this project is that it took 10 days to develop the full vision and to begin to implement, how does your team tackle this? Um, you know, considering the conditions you're currently facing to be able to communicate rapidly prototype and then have this idea, you know, be brought to life actually there is The main thing, this is the big idea when you have the big idea that then the people will join you so shortly and it's a massive wave when when we release it the project on 20 March and then we made an Oakland call that people can join us. So we've got like up to 650 volunteers, different different stages like this as an architect is the lawyers as the landlord just want to participate in this because this problem covers all over the Ukraine and there's so many people is willing to help us and willing to solve this problem with us. So with that many different disciplines that are aligned against a single focus goal. What was the design brief? What were some of the values and principles that you listed out to help give them a clear direction of what you were trying to accomplish? The main aim, as I said, it was to remain the dignity way of life because while the people lost losing their homes as well, they are losing the connection in between neighbors, friends, family, favorite places. So that's how we need to to cover this on this project. So that's how we develop all the rules for the quantity of the technical spaces of the restaurants, the place where they can just hang out. So we analyze Like 50 up to 50 or different similar projects and we realized we need to invent their some space just to do nothing just to communicate in a level of floor plan on the level of the master plan. So they need to they need to have the same comfort level as they have before they just left their homes. And one of the things that I'm personally curious about is for the Children and being able to design an environment where their education and their well being isn't significantly disrupted. Walk us through how you account for families that have Children that are being displaced as well during this time. You know the thing is the Children is used to any conditions so fast even faster than they're growing up in the months staying in the underground station at the bomb shelter, they're playing hide and seek and they slide through the like underground escalator. So but I don't want them to be used to this kind of situation. That's how we invent the same kindergartens, the same playgrounds outdoor here. It isn't a temporary decision, it's like fully scoped project but it's super cheap and super fast mounting. So we we did the project from 10 10 days but you can mount it in three months. So for super super small amount of money so I don't want to be the Children or either or anybody else gets used to the to the worst or to the bad conditions that this is our aim as well. That's beautiful. Um can we see the first image please? Because I want to make sure that the audience is able to see some of the brilliant work. And have you discussed what they're looking at? So what you have up on the screen is is a rendering of uh re Ukraine refugee housing. So walk us through, what are we looking at? What are some of the things that we should take note of um that you're especially proud of that are differentiated from other solutions that have, you know, shown up in the past. I can say that this is uh something special. It's a super simple and nice architectural, minimalistic forum. So my point is, we're not we're not going to do some like uh I don't know, some special architecture there, It should be simple and nice and well understandable for all of the, all of the lawyers of the people who will live there. It shouldn't be something like, wow there, it just needs to be comfort level that people can be used to this so fast and they need to be to feel free there to do anything there anymore. That's wonderful. So when you think about, you know, the materials, the lighting, the layout, the space, um what were some of those considerations because it is designed to be a symbol quickly. How did you go about, you know, making those critical decisions Actually we we've done this four different times. We, we go through the project with four different technologies because we need to be ready to cover the huge the massive scope of works immediately in the like parallel way. That's how we go from the wooden structure to the metal structure, from the sea panels, wood panels to the sandwich panels with the metal enforces structure. So we do have actually four different decisions with the same architecture with the same solutions with the same level of comfort and like the principles of comfort but it helps us to build up like immediately in one side with different companies to cover all the production on Ukraine was able to continue working right now. I just, I just want to add that nobody has an an an experience to make a project or build up during the war. So it's for us every day. It's a new day every day. It's a new information. We can't prognosis, we can leave and make a project day by day. So this is the complicated. Yeah. And so so with those complications, specifically as you mentioned, it's never happened before and everything is unpredictable. How did you determine the location to place these facilities? We are just keep in touch with hundreds of different companies. Uh we, we made an open call, We contact with them, we are just control what is going on, what's with the supply, what's with the production, what with the human resource because as you know, many of people just go to the territory, defense and military defense. And there is actually a big problem. Uh, for example the missiles hit some wooden structure plants and then we can't diagnose so right now, so it's day by day planned routine and it's something that that is also tremendously phenomenal about the work that you're doing. Or I would say more of the calling that you've answered is that not only are you providing housing but you're protecting the history of the Ukraine by making sure that there's also a way to preserve the monuments. Um, if we could see the next slide, could you, could you walk us through something. Um, you know, the factors that contributed to that project and how you're going to preserve the history in a way that's still informative. I'm gonna celebrate the Ukraine but at the same time protection as monuments. Yes. That the, the government of different cities is do some work to, to cover and to hide somehow super extremely fast to preserve the historical historical heritage. And they do this in a super fast way. They just cover with like uh, sandbox or with something else just to be sure that it's world works while the missile will hit beside or just hit in front and then we just take a little bit of time to realize that it's not really an aesthetic away. So we have an expression in Ukraine that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary decision. And now we are speaking about the temporary aesthetics. So, even the temporary decision should be aesthetically cover it. And aesthetically well understandable. So, that's how we rethink about this decision. We made the like double wall. We made the infographic over this. We make some information there while you're passing the favorite movement. You shouldn't see like a garbage all over this. So, and you should see some nicely done easily to understand some information and super graphics just over this space. Mm hmm. So how did you determine which monuments to protect first? Because there's so much heritage, so much culture. Um how did you go about determining where to start with that project? Actually, today's working continue. And like in the two days we will have some first pilot project covered by us with my friends. It's the moment of dostoevsky in the city of Kiev actually on this holiday, will have the day of uh, here. So we do have up to 15, 15 different monuments and the city government calls us to make a decision how we can cover this. So, we went through all of them, withdrew all over them and then we just gave for free all the information actually, all of our work, we're giving like we're donating this. We're not taking any fees or any. We're not charging ourselves. So, this is our aim just to help as fast as we can as maximum effect as we can and to help us both of us. I mean the whole Ukrainian cities and we're inventing not a decision. We're inventing the system which help you to multiply the decision. This is the really important thing. One of the critical words you use is we. And considering the room that we're in right now, the people you're speaking with, how might we actually show up to help you and support this mission to be able to preserve the heritage of the Ukraine and be able to apply that to our our society as well. Like how can we help For now? It's I think that it's a media coverage. So you need to spare the world all the news from the official side. So you need to spread about what is going on in Ukraine day by day. Today. It's the three months of world like it's 24th match. So it's it's Three months and 19 days. We were staying there for Ukraine. We're staying at the volunteers as the civilians, as the military guys and helping each other. And from your side, it's a huge amount of work and I'm really appreciate with all of the all of the world helping and supporting Ukraine in the different ways and you're already doing the huge work. So I really appreciate this from my side from my personal court and me as well. So thank you again, For example, for the example, this interview is helping you and helping us to be a little bit more sure what's going on from the first stage slava. I just want to say you are the embodiment of servant leadership, you're a real life superhero and from myself to you exceptionally proud to be in conversation with you. Thank you for joining us today and we are you know, here for you and with you. Thank you very much.

Catherine Courage, Vice President, Product Design, Google
Joann Wu, Vice President, Head of Design, Uber 
In conversation with: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Who Are We Designing For? 

we're going to move now to the world of tech here in the U. S. And globally. And the brutally competitive tech landscape companies are starting to place more emphasis on user research within their design practices and given the blows that the tech industry has taken in consumer perception, there's also an increasing focus on building trust and inclusivity as the central parts of the design process, helping forge long term bonds with their user and customer base. We're going to hear now from to design leaders at google and Uber about their human centered design processes and how user experience insights can catalyze growth and innovation. Please welcome to the stage, Catherine Courage, vice president of product design at google and Joanne wu Vice president and head of design at Uber guys welcome thanks for having us. So Joanne, I'd like to start with you because you're new, you're new in your job relatively new. You've just started at Uber in january after 10 years at linkedin. So moving from one exciting tech company to another. Um what did you see? I'm just curious like coming into Uber, what did you see if the challenge coming in as head of design from the outside and then what has it been like to get in there for a few months and you know, assess from the inside, You know what what the design uh operation is like there and you know where you want to take it. Yeah, thank you for the question. Really great question. You put me on the spot. Yeah, coming into Uber, I, you know, from outsider. I'm always fascinating about this company is there's a magic, right? You push the button, you get the right uh, part of the reason I want to come to the company to learn new things after getting into Uber for five months, there's definitely a lot of complicity in terms of parliament solving the dimension of the marketplace is really complex. You have writers, you have eaters, you have earners that we call them drivers and careers as well as the merchant, right? We have a both go and get. So for me to fully understand the business that take a while at the same time, I also um, observe the people there are so driven as a culture, you know, in terms of how they're focusing on one Uber and focusing on trip obsession, It's really amazing. So stop here for a second. Yeah. So I mean, you know, in the history of Uber, it grew so quickly, it went from being, you know, just this idea to being in almost every major city around the world, you know, in just a couple of years and it was just like all speed and you know, uh, and then in the pandemic, uh, you know, again, like there's this embrace of the Uber eats opportunity, but the, the challenge of, you know, providing this service. So it's just been like Sprint, Sprint, Sprint. So what, you know, how does, how does that marry with the culture of user research and in our topic today that user centered design. How do you step back from that kind of you know history of racing ahead and and think about the customer. Yeah, I think that will ever switch more about the trip obsession as a culture. Uh in the most year, not only we still have the spirit go and get it, but also now we learn more from our user and customer. So if you think about you XRs role right now, you know they moved from you think about the double diamond for design process. More away from just doing validated research at the very end of development but more upfront in the explorer phase so we can do informative and foundational research. The further influence the roadmap and priority. So that's the shift I see in the organization also part of my job to help the team continue that journey moving forward. Great and uh get your questions ready we'll have some time at the end to uh to call in a couple of people Catherine. Um I understand that you know, user research has been a big area of growth at google over the last seven several years. Um I believe you have 1000 people and user research 1313 100. Um what has driven that growth other than the overall growth of google but well you know what is really powered sort of, you know the growth of that capacity and uh and how does it work? And inside the company just take us inside sort of your operation for a second. Yeah it's uh it's a great question. I'll try and unpack it a little bit if we go back to google's roots. I think the company its origins have been very much an inside out company and that we've got these brilliant technologists who would design features and capabilities and it's like if you build it they will will come. We've had to transition over the years and moved to an outside in company. So really focusing on our users, what are their needs, what are the opportunities and how do we build towards that in order to do that. It means we've really needed to grow a research capability and uh not just the number of researchers, it's a different practice of research. We've moved from just You X. Rs which is a role and function to really thinking about insights which involves people who are data scientists which involves business analysts really having this holistic picture of our users um deeply understanding their environment. But understanding industry factors, trends that are emerging and using this to come together to understand where we need to to go. The additional thing I would say that's been hugely important over the last couple of years is moving from insights to activation because in our early days there were endless research reports and a research report that just sits on the shelf may as well have not have happened. And so how do you make sure that you take those early insights and activate teams, whether it's through prototyping or doing exercises around how might we so you can move the organization to where we need to head next. So it's been really cool to see that as part of the evolution of design having a a larger role in driving strategy that research has been absolutely core. So what are some examples I'd love to hear, you know, with with this 1300 person group and you're and you're talking about activation. But how do you work, how do you work side by side with product development you know and really implemented? So you're not just you know, getting insights and Yeah, yeah. It's a it's a great question. I think it goes back to again, a research are not real insights are not owned by researchers that you have to activate the whole organization and get the whole organization to really become more customer focused customer center. We may be the prompt or we may be the amplifiers, but how do you get that PM that end that program manager to care and to speak the language of the customer. And so it means in every single presentation in every forum that that is the base place in which you start all your conversations and it's definitely been a pivot and a transition for us within the company. But I think until you realize that everyone has got the responsibility for speaking the voice of the customer. Um it can become just the role of that team and going to that team like coin operated insights as opposed to really deeply understanding our users. Is there an example you can share of how that process translated into the evolution of a product or a new product? Yeah, um lots of examples. So um let me give one of one that was actually announced a couple of weeks ago. So we were doing a lot of deep research around inclusive design which is such an important topic on these days and we're putting increased emphasis on it and realizing it was really important for people to see themselves in google's results. And one of the areas that we were seeing this through deep research uh is in the area of beauty and it just, it would not have occurred to the people who work at Google who represent a certain uh, you know, categorization of people in society that if you look at the global base that we um serve, whether it is looking at users in India or Japan or looking at age group or looking at race uh that when people were searching for products in the area of beauty, they were seeing this generic in many cases whitewashed representation. And so one of the examples that we just launched was a skin tone that you know, people want to be able to see if they're searching for beauty products. They don't want to just see fair skin tones uh results, they want to see skin tones that reflect their skin tone. And so giving people capabilities, adding new dimensions to the algorithm where people could start to see themselves. And if it wasn't for deep research to help people understand that the experience I have is not the experience that other users have. I don't think we would have made this realization so obvious, but not too not internally, it's really interesting. But just picking up on part of what you said, do you does the algorithm make a judgment about what their skin tone is based on everything you know about them then you're kind of putting yourself out there a little bit to guess or do you just present to them more options so that they can find the right option for them. So it's giving control of people who are posting content so they can state what skin tones are there. They can tag for people who are presenting content and as a user that I have control and I can filter and choose what I want to to see. So a little bit of both sides of the the content providers as well as users being able to curate, interesting. Um you know, it kind of gets to uh topic that I want to talk about um broadly, which is trust. I mean I think inclusiveness is related to to trust and I want to probe both um because the more the user feels comfortable like the product is designed for me theoretically the more they'll trust there's another aspect to trust, but I'm wondering Joanne if you have similar examples of of evolving the product or or ways you see that you can evolve it to to bring that same kind of or you know, your own version of inclusiveness to your user base. Yeah, I think trust is the core for you know uh uber company value uh similar you know to Catherine was said that we learned from a user how my way made the platform more safe and inclusive. One example I would like to share is a woman um right for reference. It's a feature for women and non binary drivers to set a reference. They may want to pick a woman writer only. So we learned through our reserve user research when we survey with women, they all have the intended to drive on this platform, but 74% would perform to drive women only. So for safety reasons as well as being inclusive. So we launched this feature in Saudi Arabia short after that country gave a woman's access or the right to drive, we learned that unique, you know, aspect or challenges from that country that woman facing and also broadly thinking about how many we give women equal access for flexible work as well, access to a greater economic independence. So this feature really hope, you know, not only South Arabian, we also launched across part of latin America, uh South africa and Middle East, most recently we launched actually this month we launched in Australia. So overall it's including trust, safety and also inclusive. Right? So that's an example. We see how my way of the platform to help the products become more accessible, safe and inclusive. So it goes both ways women drivers can request only to pick up women and women or other people who want to request only a woman driver can right now, it's the one way like a driver for reference. Got it. Okay, and how did you, how did you roll that out and communicate that and make that clear. You know what the option was and and make it easy for people to use? Yeah, in the driver app we have that reference. It's like I said, it's not global yet because they were based on the culture needs and specific location. So you could go to your preference and turned on or off based on your preference, right? You may want to turn on during the night or during the weekend. So it's really based on your choice. Uh if you have questions, stick your hand up and we'll get you and mike Catherine, I wanted to ask you about something we were chatting about like which is um you know what google is learning about. Um speaking of how people use the product around the world about how people use the fundamental search product differently in different parts of the world. Um and you know, sometimes they're searching with audio rather than typing and so they searched differently and uh tell us about that challenge and then you know how you change your your offering to respond to that. Yeah, it's another, I love the classic example from design of OXO of OXO designing, you know, these grips devices for people with arthritis, but then realizing they had huge benefit for all kinds of users. And I think we've had the same when we look at different modalities of searching that it's one thing to type and tap, but that doesn't work for for everyone. And you may think of it as an accessibility use case for example, perhaps someone is not able to type, they could use voice well using voice can also be really high advantage for someone who doesn't have english as a language or for someone who has literacy issues. So these use cases have become huge value and then additionally we've added imagery being able to search with images and so I think this is the future. Um it's also we've seen that having these modalities, it's not just for these specific targeted use cases when we look at youth as a population. These are the ways that they naturally tend to search and look for for information. And again, a lot of these research, these insights have come from deep research that we've done with different populations. Tell us just a little bit more about the searching with images function and then how you translate just that. The technology of that, the cool technology of that to what you do to bring that user research and how can we make this a product that really works for people. It's not just like, you know, cool Gizmo. Yeah. You know one of the things that I will say that we are working on at google as technologists is better storytelling. You know, we have this dream of incredible technology but we don't do the justice of telling the story and the amazing use cases around it. And google lens is one of these technologies that is just amazing and it's on you know, IOS and android. It's within the google app and you can take a picture of anything. Uh and search results will appear. And now we just launched a new version where you can take a picture and add text. So you can take a picture of, I see Richard, I can take a picture of his shoes and those shoes will appear, it's kind of magical. Or when I'm hiking I'll take pictures of plants and it will tell me what that plant is. And I could take a picture of the shoes and I could say I want them in black and similar results would appear. So it's just it's really cool uh technology and we're working on better storytelling muscles to get people to understand these, these cool use cases in which they can use this, you know, very cutting edge technology to do new kinds of searches. Do you have data on the demographics of, you know, by age? Uh, you know, who's likely to use that? Do you have a sense of like what all of us use that if we knew how to do it and figured out or is that really gonna only be something like people under age 25 are going to, you know, I think, you know what we, we've found is with a lot of our technology. Uh, you know, some of these things that are bleeding edge, it may be under 24 that are early adopters, but they, you know, set the trend that everyone else will, will follow. So to me, you know, my my hope is that this just becomes a base way of searching in the future that it isn't just something that we, we see uh youth leading into. So um you know, one of the questions we started with yesterday was about the challenges ahead and, and talent was, you know, top of the list I'm curious to ask both of you. I'll start with you Joanne, um how what's the challenge of finding the talent, you need to build these, you know, new capacities at Uber and where are you looking to find talent and to diversify your talent pool? Yeah, overall hiring is a big challenge for everyone at this point. Especially finding diverse talent. It's also very hard. I think I will wear away are introducing you know, program called the design pathway. Uh it's a way to start contributing to the community to bring people who are underserved who want to change their career. Uh they can, you know, work with us first going nine weeks of general assembling partnership for training and then come back to Uber embedded into our team for eight months. It's kind of like an apprenticeship right this way we can nurturing more diverse talent and also contribute back to the design community. I feel overall, you know, not only hiring the challenge, how my way created momentum as a design leaders to contribute back to the community and grow the next generation. Our diverse talent is our responsibility. Great. We do have one question. We have time for one quick question. So just identify yourself real quick, Justin McGuire, Chief Design Officer Salesforce, um huge respect for both of you and the roles you have and advancing on the profession. Uh the question is um you know, we've all lived long enough in our design profession to see us go from a place of like fighting for a seat at the table, put in air quotes to deeply having one and I'm curious when you think about on your roles, can you talk a little bit about what you've been doing to help drive a different level of accountability for what a ceo should expect from a chief design officer. That's a great question. I'm I'm I'm happy to start off. I think one of the areas that we've really leaned into goes back to where we started this conversation which is uh research in that if we can be driving the conversation, if we're looking around the corner, if we instead I'm looking at the obvious things, we're looking at the adjacent areas and really provoking the company to think about uh these areas that are nontraditional to us but where the opportunities are and to me that is the area that if we're really gonna be driving strategy that we need to help our executives not just deal with the here and now. I think we're good at that. We've developed a great practice there. But how do we look around the corner of what the next thing is and and that's what I've been really excited to lean into. Great, I think that's a great place to leave it. We gotta keep looking around the corner and thanks so much Catherine and Joanne for joining us today

Giorgia Lupi, Partner, Pentagram
In conversation with: Kate Aronowitz, Co-Chair, Brainstorm Design 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing With Data

presentations from political polls to our weekly sleep scores. Mine are not looking very good by the way. Uh this torrent of superficial graphics shouts at us but often misleads were we understand misunderstand what it's telling us and the ubiquity is driven by the false promise of simplifying complexity. Georgia, Lupi and information design luminary is convinced that we can do better. And her manifesto for data humanism, she urges us to contextualize data and incorporate more qualitative and nuanced aspects in the stories we tell, thereby connecting the numbers to what they really stand for. Knowledge, behaviors and people, we'll ask Georgia how data humanism can help us tell more empathetic stories and explore how elevated data visualization helps brands better engage with their customers for our next conversation. Please welcome Georgia Lupi partner at Pentagram together with Fortune brainstorm design co chair Kate Aronowitz, everybody. Hi everybody. Um so Georgia, it's great to have you here with us today. Um you've been a partner now at Pentagram for about three years. Um Pentagram is amazing uh design icon but we usually associate them more with like brand and identity. It's really interesting that they have you on site now. Thinking about data like why add data into the mix. Yeah, yeah, I've been a part of the pentagon for three years and uh you might know Pentagram for brand identities and more traditional kind of graphic design projects but I think what they had seen in my work. And also the reason why I was particularly happy to join is that data can really be one of the new languages. I mean it's actually an old language but a new way that we can have right now especially to actually create brand expressions of any kind. Um It's interesting I think back until a while ago we thought of designers that we only had words and images to create brand expressions and televisual stories. I really believe the data right now is one of the fundamental ingredients. Um you know that we also have obviously it's about the approach to data that you have of course and you coined if we could get the first slide up please you've coined a term called data humanism and I think we've got your manifesto kind of explaining that um what we bring that up. Can you tell us what is data humanism and where did that come from? Sure. Um I started to think about um a different approach to data back in 2016. So this is a 2016 visual manifesto that I think still stands behind my work and it came from the realization that most of the times a lot of clients that I had tend to focus on the quantitative aspect of the data that they had. The data that they already collected as opposed to kind of like really focusing on what the data represented and all of the inherently human qualities of data because data is actually I would like to say data are plural, data are representation of our life and therefore they embed the uncertainty imperfection of our lives. And even if data come from a sensor, the human being designed the center and decided what to collect and what to leave out. So even missing data are a really important part of the conversation. And I think for me this is really was really a way to sympathize um what I think as a designer, I'm primarily a design and I'm not a data scientist, I'm not a statistician. As a designer. I can bring to the data world and to the way that we communicate stories to data focusing on the human qualities that again are inherently part of any data that we will ever collect. I love that idea that I think so often we associate data being very technical and I love the idea of like a designer being able to use it in a different way. So it's hard to ignore the role that data has played in our lives for the past two years whether it was red and blue maps on tv um or a curve. Like understanding what it meant to bend the curve or data you know on your phone every morning telling you to wear a mask or not or if it was okay to go outside or not. Um I even I was telling you recently that a friend of mine came back to work for maternity leave, she's a new mom, I see her in the office and like oh my gosh how are you doing? She does not show me baby pictures. She pulls up her phone and she shows me the feed off of her or a ring which tells me like how much she's sleeping and not sleeping and she's got his feeding schedule and she starts to tell me you know I think I can win him at night but the data is telling me maybe I shouldn't. I mean so we're inundated with all of this data is actually a good thing or a bad thing I guess. Again it depends on how we use them and how we um take a proactive approach and understanding them. I think though we're in a very interesting moment because if we think about the pandemic, I mean you studied but we passed from a population where only a few of us cared about data like I mean I've been obsessed with data for a while to a population and everybody looked at charts and maps every day to make critical decisions. But I think the question that we have to ask ourselves is are we literate enough like that illiterate enough as a population And that doesn't necessarily only mean learn how to read the charge. But do we ask ourselves critical questions about how is the data being collected? What is that? I'm not seeing in here even looking at hospitalization. Like asking yourself do you also look at the people who are discharged and the positivity rate, how many people have taken the test and I think the risk here is especially with theory precise charts is that we then tend to take them as universal truths as we see a 55 that the day after it goes up to 57 we say like wow this is really bad. Probably is and it really is an indication that it is, but we have to ask ourselves what is that we're not collecting, what is that? We're not there? And again, I think design is a great opportunity because we do understand data visually and so through visuals. Um we can make sense of them. Is it good or bad to have too much data? I think it depends on how much we can become data fluent as a population and so not to get overwhelmed and driven by data but but as opposed to that just really having it as a tool at our disposal to make better decisions and learn more about the world in a way. Mhm. Um I'd love to show some of your work that you have to do at at Pentagram because I think it might surprise people some of the work that you've done. Um and what I love about the first project that you're gonna show um a fashion project is it's it's about getting people to kind of notice details in a new way and and help them learn through data. Can you tell us a little bit about this project? Yeah, well it was one of the most fun projects I've worked on. I ended up designing a fashion collection for the brand and other stories which is a part of the H and M. Group. And every year they have a collab collection with an external designer or artist. Um and they asked me can you do, I mean of course they knew that I work with data. And so the brief was really this year with 2019 wanna tell empowering stories and inspirational stories about women. Um do whatever you want with data. You have 13 pieces of your disposal. And I told the stories of three women in a Loveless. This is the pattern that displays the globalists algorithm is a Loveless is by the fact the creator of computer science that she was by by the matter of fact really the person that first of all made a machine do complex math and the pattern that you see is the uh 36 step algorithm that she created. What's interesting is that you can go and look at the clothes and hopefully think that they're beautiful clothes that you want to buy home. But anything about the publicity and the way the decline worked with me started to show that there was data behind it. And so even again the photos with the model posing and me recreating the legend and the paper bags in the back had a legend about it. The other women were Rachel Carson first environmental activists that with the box out in spring, that was published in 1962 really spearheaded the environmentalist movement and Mae Jemison first african american woman astronaut um and her 1992 mission drowned space and the project was really successful. Um but I don't think it's because they were pretty patterns. It's because really people could use them as a almost of a spark of a conversation for telling a story. And what I think is that, you know, ultimately it's a different way of seeing a T shirt with a graphic written message, like the pattern that you're wearing our messages that you're proud to carry around. Um so yeah, that's a long story short about this project, I love it. And even the bag and I love, you know, you have the legend on the bag and everything. That's like this idea of going in and noticing the small details. Um, the next project, I think, you know, so much data can kind of divide us and be very cold and hard and I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about a project that you did with the singer, Katy keene and and and her daughter. Sure, Sochi um is a friend of mine, she is an amazing musician if you don't know her, like really shoutout Kaki King, She's great. Um but at some point, her three, that was 2017. Again, they're three years old daughter cooper got diagnosed with a condition named I. T. P. That affects her immune system and leads to spontaneous bruises, birth blood vessels on the scheme called paktika. And in the most terrifying cases even internal bleeding and cocky wanted to make sense of these periods and so this moment and trying to even figure out how to talk to doctors about what she would have serving as they were you know refining the diagnosis. So we started to collect data about what cocky observed daily like the level of bruises on cooper's skin. The particular how she was feeling. Um the medications that she was taking, anything that could have affected um you know what Cooper was feeling at the same time for herself to you know make sense of this. She started to collect data about how he was feeling and you know the things that she was trying and that was just me reading her blog she shared with me this very personal data. Um but then I asked myself you know she wanted to share the journey after and um she wanted to show what she was going through. And I ask myself how can I make a data visualization that can also evoke empathy and make people feel part of khaki story as opposed to doing a sterile visualization. So this is the sketch and I think you'll see the visualization after. Um Which I don't know if we'll be able to zoom but every single pedal that you see is one day on this four months of a data collection. Uh and obviously the timeline is not linear as in like this is interrupted in clusters by the days. And the moments that were most important for cocky and her family interrupted that. But the burst of red dots which are the moments where cooper got to the hospital to check her platelet level. And so the red dots that kind of like interrupted timeline are the number of platelets when you see a lot of them is good in the beginning that there's 12 or three. It's really terrifying. And then on top of each pedal um I have just like really painted in a way the brushes that will identify the intensity of the bruises. Like trying really to work on brushes that could recall that in the little Patika and a lot of other information that um you know, help us tell the stories through that. Then cocky composed music out of it. And so there's a video and everything is on my website, our pentagon website where she composed the song exactly as um the visualization of the timeline. And I think what's interesting in here is that cocky herself talks about this moment of data collection and data representation as a cathartic moment to understand makes sense. And remain saying. Um but then when we shared the project and we had the great opportunity to share it at the big Oprah theater in Cape Town for an artistic installation in a way so many people then told us that through data only because we told the story only through data then they felt so much connected to Kaki story. Probably more than a blog post with words could be. Um And so again if we can embed feelings and sentiments and hopes and qualitative details to any data collection. I mean obviously this is very artistic, very speculative and not doing this with corporate clients. But I think this is an invite to think about data has again human and potentially able to help. Yeah, no I love the idea of evoking empathy so much more than a chart to really show the human condition behind it. Um I think the last project we're going to take a look at very different. Um it's an identity project that you worked on with Bill and Melinda Gates. Right? That's the idea that data can show gaps opportunities and actually become a system. Yeah. So Gates get the Gates Foundation and especially right on Melinda french Gates. Um That's one of my biggest clients. We work with them a lot and this was a great opportunity because Melinda even right before the pandemic but then we worked throughout the pandemic was really focused on telling stories about gender integration. Um She talks about gender integration more than gender equality as a step forward to actually making changes happen. And we branded the way that they told these stories to data. So in the video that you've seen before you start to see that there are charts but everything starts with an equal and plus sign that overlaps and in itself functions as a branding element almost as a logo. But then get impact in the way that visually charts about different indicators that countries might have about how women are doing about finance, inclusion, education, care giving um and men are doing in the countries and so all the data that they were working with were comparison of unfortunately still very binary data collections about men and women where many times also data collected about women where insufficient insufficient and so not even barely coming to address most of the population. So part of the system that we created for them also included how to show missing data. And the system um created 20 templates for different data visualizations because at that point they needed like 20 indicators but then we kept flexing and flexing it right now. It's pretty much brand in the way that they tell stories about gender integration through data in a different way. Well thank you. I got this really inspiring. Especially when you think about the status science and and the tool that we can use as a designer to bring awareness to things. Um Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you very much. Yeah

Alastair Simpson; Dropbox
Allison Vendt; Dropbox

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Workplace Reinvention Going Virtual First

 Workplace Reinvention Going Virtual First

So we often think about design teams, solving more external problems. Um we're collecting were excuse me we're connecting products and services um with customers that build them. Um but when the company work for flips its entire working model from 97 uh in the office pre pandemic going completely virtual first the design team gets to solve a really cool in house problem and that's the case that Dropbox the design team actually co lead with HR in designing a transformative workplace initiative to get everybody to go virtual first. So we're gonna hear from the two executives that work together on this together um and they got to promote both productivity but also uh staff engagement was really important. So please welcome to the stage Alistair Simpson, the vice president of design at Dropbox along with Allison vent the head of people, strategy and operations and analytics at Dropbox and joining them in conversation will be fortune leadership editor, ruth. Um Oh all right, good morning everyone Alistair Allison welcome. It is so great to have you both with us. Great much to discuss. So let's begin by level set in as was noted in the introduction. Dropbox employs a virtual first work model first of all, how do you define that? I guess you know the levels that pre pandemic, Roughly 3000 people uh distributed across the world, mainly co located in offices. And so when we flip the model, just the very kind of basics, we went virtual first what we're calling it we primary experience for employees to work remotely from a home office but then we've importantly we recognized the importance for in person collaboration and so we've retained some office space but rebranded them studios and then we've intentionally designed them for um moments of collaboration and culture building. So what you won't see at a drop box studio is rows and rows of death for people to individually work because they're purposefully designed for people to meet, collaborate and come together to have this kind of special moments. So to confirm, Virtual First should not be conflated with remote only. Correct? Yeah. And, you know, we we recognize the importance of human to human kind of in person collaboration. It's really important whilst we think and we know we see from research that people want flexibility in how they work and they don't necessarily want to commute every day. Absolutely, We'll soon be digging into that very research with far more granularity. Before I do. Uh And as was noted during the introduction, pre pandemic, 97% of drop boxes, employees work in the office, meaning just 3% work from home. You since made this pivot to a Virtual First work model that was really created in partnership between the design function and the HR team, walk us through how a design wound up co leading the initiative alongside the people, organizations with very different factions. Yeah. Alison depressed that in a second, but I guess the, you know, for me there's two reasons, I mean, one, you know, slightly tongue in cheek answer is, you know, I kind of elbowed my way in a little bit, but I do believe personally that as executive design leaders we have to interact with and partner with functions outside of just engineering a product. So we have to reach out and work with the chief people officer to work with our Cfos because I believe in this level, you have to have company wide kind of durable impact and if you can design a better company in a better system, then your teams are going to produce better products. And so that's just from a personal point of view, how I think about my role as an executive design leader. The second point really comes from Dropbox is that we saw this as an opportunity to redesign how we work because if we're honest with ourselves pre pandemic, the office didn't really work and how we were working didn't really work for many people. And so we really wanted, we saw this as a design problem and how do you actually apply design thinking or human centered design, basically putting the employee as your customer at the center of everything you do and then actually, you know, create a hypothesis, build something, tested iterate on that and kind of measure and learn. And so we really saw this as a design problem as a company and that was why I kind of colette along with Allison and mel, the Chief people officer, this initiative Allison, I'd love to hear from you, why integrate from a talent strategy perspective the design function, we have this cross functional approach. Yeah, I mean I think uh you know very much to echo what Alistair said when we initially kind of kicked off this project, like in terms of what does remote work look like a dropbox, it really began as an HR LED initiative. Um and I think we very quickly realized um that this was going to require just an enormous transformation or reimagining of everything that we do at dropbox End to End talent strategy, obviously being a huge part of that, but also things like our physical spaces, how we think about security and privacy and then importantly our practices and how we work together. And so um I think that you know, we were really lucky because we um Alistair actually I think you started a couple of months before um we ended up kind of kicking off this initiative and uh you know and Alistair had a lot of experience um at at a previous company actually be several previous companies working um in this space. And so uh and again I think because it requires such an enormous transformation and truly unlearning and unwinding behaviors that have been in place for over a century, we really did want to take a really innovative approach and as Alistair said, a very human centered design approach to every piece of the employee experience And um even beyond that, how we operate as well. So that was really um I think what what anchor does? Absolutely. We've seen a number of tech companies call their employees back to the office. They say they're moving into a hybrid work structure. We've seen a number of financial institutions mandate that their employees return full time. So the obvious question is why choose a predominantly remote work strategy for the future of drop offs is workforce. I think, you know, when you listen to your employees, I think Ethan was talking yesterday that there's a future forum that slack kind of Khalid cell source. Um and they've got lots of data on uh survey results from listening to employees. When you listen to employees, they want flexibility, not just in where they work, but in their schedules and how they work. Because, you know, Allison just mentioned that the kind of modern, well offers, It's really kind of been around 100 years, it goes back to kind of factory work synchronized in time, synchronized in the same place, like 9-5, just been extended by technology to go from 7-7. So you can answer email kind of before and after work. And so when you actually listen to your employees, what they're asking for is flexibility. Okay. And so what we've tried to do a Dropbox is then take those lessons from listening to our employees and then design an approach that optimizes for our employees, but also optimizes for our business. And so you mentioned that, I also mentioned the behavior shifts that we're trying to unwind and I think we'll share them on the actually let's cue that visual right now, because if you if you think about the shift that you're trying to make and these will probably resonate with many of you, you know, we're trying to unlearn that reflective habit to go to have synchronous meetings all day. The technology enabled us to go very quickly into kind of remote ways of working, but actually is it good to just be in back to back meetings all day? I don't know whether it necessarily is. And so certainly when you listen to employees, that's what they're struggling with. And so we've got these five behavior shifts that we've anchored all of our work in a drop box and this is based on market research and also internal kind of customer, internal employee data. And so what we're trying to do is help our employees change their behavior and unlearned habits that have been ingrained in us for over a century, as Allison mentioned. And so how do we help people go from the back to back zoom meetings to asynchronous by default. And some of the ways that we're doing that are things like we have a practice called core collaboration hours, which is four hours of synchronous work every day where that's connected to your local time zone. So for me in san Francisco I'm expected to be online between nine and one in my local time zone for synchronous collaboration or to synchronously reply to messages Outside of 9-1, I can create my own nonlinear workday that's flexible around my personal schedule. And so for example on Mondays and Fridays, I finished at three and I take my daughter swimming and that's what I did and then I come back online later on in the evening. But in that time in that nonlinear workday we're asking people to work more a synchronously by default. So the behavioral shift that we're trying to get to. And so all of our practices have been anchored around trying to help our employees change their behavior for the better. And then you know, focusing on these kind of five shifts that were at least I'd like to q a visual to while I pivot to the next question. Dropbox studios, how does that fit into this overarching strategy? Yeah. So I mean our dropbox studios definitely play an important role in our overall strategy. Alistair mentioned, human connection is something that we believe is really important. It's really important at Dropbox but beyond that it's very important period and there's really no replacement for that. And so we wanted to enable um you know that as much as possible. I think this is you know right now we have Dropbox studios in all of the locations where we previously had um offices and as I also mentioned, they've been, you know, completely redesigned to focus on group collaboration, there also a space for connection as well. And so um how we think about utilizing those studios is teams have budget to travel to the studios once per quarter, uh and uh you know, and then you have these sort of multi day off sites where um we really try to focus on what what are like complex problems that you're trying to solve. Um strategy planning, um really sort of like the richness of of what you can um you know, kind of do in person, that's really important for the dropbox studios. Um some of our teams are still somewhat co located, so some teams may go in more regularly than that and I think this is something um you know, we actually just opened our studios in March of this year um given all of the uncertainty with covid and so I think we're really learning um also and evolve, will evolve our studio model over time. Uh And and you know, just really looking at year one is gathering a lot of data right now, the only thing I'd add is like, you know, one of the principals around how I went to studio is just to keep it special, it's like what is that? And that's something we've just tried to help and guide employees. It's like, you know, it is important to me, but keep it special special, like what is if I think about another thing that we share in our toolkit, that's something I'd I'd plug um you can anyone can go and download this and use it online. It's the Dropbox Virtual first toolkit and it's 20 practices is essentially designed thinking democratized in a box around how to kind of change your habits. And one of those linking to keep it special is how do you reduce unnecessary meetings? Okay. Because if you think about it, you know, most of us, probably most people are in back to back meetings, but a lot of those meetings may not be necessary for synchronous time. And so something that we have in that socket is Make sure that your synchronous moments around the three D. So for important decision making discussion and debate. Okay. And that might be something that you can accomplish remotely or to the to the principal around keeping it special, Maybe you actually need to come in and meet in person because it's Allison's point, you're trying to solve a really complex problem where you actually need to meet in person and that's a good moment for when to gather in person and to actually utilize like being face to face for deep work. Absolutely. Allison, you repeatedly used the phrase evolve or evolution and I know that the adoption of new work models requires an adjustment period would have been the most significant challenges to implement in a virtual infrastructure uh and more importantly, what, you know, what what changes have you instituted as a result, whereas in response. Yeah, I mean I think first and foremost is the fact that these um work behaviors are so ingrained into all of us and so it requires a lot of intention, um a lot of leadership modeling um and and just a lot of kind of consistency of um you know, how we're messaging, messaging this across dropbox. And so I think that um that sort of unlearning um these behaviors has probably been the biggest challenge um and also that it needs consistent attention and it's for example, um Alistair talked about to reduce unnecessary meetings, practice my personal favorite practice and that's when I actually have to run that almost weekly because it's it's a very real problem. Meeting creep absolutely happens. And so it's also about just sort of reinforcing that message over and over again. And I think, you know, frankly when we initially announced this strategy in October 2020, there were skeptics uh for sure, and I think a lot of what we had to do was um you know, obviously reinforced the model, but also talk about the benefits and I actually think that adoption and um buy into the model has come as we've seen results over, you know, the last year and a half, which have been consistently trending upwards in terms of folks getting more better work life balance, more productivity, more focused time. And we've really been transparent about what's working and also what isn't and and and adapting our model to address that too. And so I think the more that um you know, we're sharing those really positive results and positive, the positive impact of Virtual First has helped with my in the start. I mean we've got an internal employee data that shows that 62% of people who've adopted virtual first report less meetings, less unnecessary meetings, 71% feel more productive. And and I think Allison said it quite kindly when she said we had skeptics quite honestly, you know, there were people that said this will never work. Like how does how do I say eight hours of meetings into four hours into my core collaboration. And I think you know, just to reinforce its that reinforcement of the message meeting people where they are with things like the Virtual First toolkit to give them scaffolding and frameworks for how they can change their behavior and then modeling that as a leadership team. You know, my calendar is fully open. We've got blogs internally from myself and other senior leaders about how we're adopting these practices practices so we're showing that it can be done following up to that remote work culture is truly meant to be an extension of the overall corporate culture, which is certainly hard to build even when you are in office, How are you building a strong culture in a distributed work model, especially if you're hiring and onboarding employees who might never touch foot in a physical office space. I like, I would start with, you know, something I've mentioned, but the virtual first toolkit, we have practices in there that are not just about how you work, but how you understand who your teammates are. And so things like creating a team charter, creating your team values. Okay, so this is these are practices around how you can learn more about the people that you're working with. Research shows as well that not just our own internal research, but external research shows that generally, you know, if your your table and that's the team that you work with, your ties with those people will be quite strong even in a remote culture or remote way of working, but you're weak tie relationships. So if you look to the table to across your weak tie relationships that you don't often engage with will be weaker because you don't see people in and around the office. And so something that we're just rolling out based on this research for us is we're we've created neighborhoods. And so those neighborhoods for myself, I'm in Palo alto. So it's like my Palo alto neighborhood. So it's just people that live in my area, right? My community of people that I may not necessarily work with, but I actually have a kind of proximity to. And so we're encouraging those people to meet monthly. We're encouraging them to do things like social impact in their community. So that you build back those kind of weak tie relationships that have been eroded in the kind of remote ways of working. And so there are a couple of things that we're doing to try and really reinforce their culture. Allison some companies are cut in pay for remote employees to reflect local labor costs. Does this shift to a digital default work model affect employee compensation. So if Dropbox workers move to locations with lower cost of living, do you adjust pay? Yeah, I mean it's a great question and it's certainly something that we keep really top of mind that our people team at dropbox um we do adjust for cost of labor uh across the board. And that's something I mean at the end of the day our compensation team anchors in data and that's what the data shows right now. Um and so we are you know, we evaluate this on a consistent basis. It could evolve. But right now the data supports anchoring to a cost of labor. We actually don't anchor to cost of living the cost of labor and Mark. And within those markets. Um And so that's our strategy right now. But again um one core principle of virtual first is taking a learning mindset and our compensation team is definitely taking that to heart. And so were consistently kind of evaluating the data around that. Absolutely. I wish to go back to the topic of remote work culture and turn to you Alistair specifically with your design team. How do you keep, how do you ensure that everyone is engaged and not only collaborating but collaborating effectively. You know, it would be one of my personal values is openness and so in terms of how I practice that every two weeks I'll share what's top of mind for me in a dropbox paper post and then encourage people to comment and that just helps people understand the things that I'm thinking about and the things that are top of mind for me and and then I'm regularly communicating in in things like slack and then office hours, I have monthly office hours that anybody in my organization can sign up to, not just my direct reports. And I think that principle about being open transparent with the information that you have and being able to connect with your team enables kind of more trust because people understand who I am, I'm not just some aloof VP and that trust then helps foster better moments of collaboration across the group and so that's incredibly important to me is that and a drop up very well said well the pandemic has upended so much in our lives but it's also providing the opportunity to reimagine and re engineer work in a way that really centers the needs of an organization's most important resource. Their talents, Alistair Allison, thank you both for your time and such a robust conversation. That was fantastic.

Paul Dillinger, Vice President, Head of Global Product Innovation, Levi Strauss & Co.  
Carmen Gama, Director of Circular Design, EILEEN FISHER  
In conversation with: Phil Wahba, Senior Writer, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Toward Circularity

Paul Dillinger, Vice President, Head of Global Product Innovation, Levi Strauss & Co.  
Carmen Gama, Director of Circular Design, EILEEN FISHER  


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Toward Circularity


Presenters: Kat Holmes, Senior Vice President, UX and Product Design, Salesforce 
Jessica Orkin, Chief Executive Officer, SYPartners 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - A Declaration Of Interdependence 

I hope you all enjoyed speaking with existing connections or making new ones during the break. The importance of our relationships informs our next conversation much has been said about the role of great individuals, whether in greek mythology or its founders of countries or corporations, their sense of destiny looseness and above all, independents are celebrated and identified as reasons for the success of the cause country or company they lead, but reality is usually different. Our next speakers believe that design requires and benefits the collective and that in our complex society we need complementary, diverse teams to identify problems and propose creative, inclusive solutions that move the needle. Please welcome kat Holmes, senior vice president of UX and product design at Salesforce in conversation with Jessica Orkin, chief executive officer of S. Y. Partners. Hello and thank you. Hey, hey Jessica. Um we are so honored to be here today and have this conversation with you and we wanted to start with a couple of personal stories and how we came to this topic and how we came to one another around this work. And um you know, for me, I um you know, I always knew early on I wanted to be an innovator and inventor, a pioneer, like my early heroes, they were all in that apple ed. Remember that one? Like here's to the crazy ones, the geniuses. Um I still cry, I want to watch it right? It just moves me and um through my career as an engineer, a designer. But I was getting my M. B. A. It's always felt like it's climbing this, pushing this um sorry my slides role of life, he jumped right into it so that individual that that lone genius kind of creating that change in the world and having that impact. And then as I was in my own career, as I continued to feel like I was, I was climbing, I was pushing in a way earning the right to lead, how I thought about it and in hindsight in many ways I was pushing to be seen often at times when I felt very invisible and all of those different environments in the world. And you know, one moment that I remember in my career it was a manager, I'll call him paul. Um my team at that time it arrived late to an event and paul says cat, I want to get your, you know, you should go get your team in a room and read them the riot act, totally unacceptable to be late. Ah I don't know what the riot act is, I have never been read it, I don't quite know what it entails, What I gathered is that paul wanted me to get these folks in the room and throw a temper tantrum to get them to do what I need. I wanted them to do what more so paul wanted them to do and as I did that and attempted that it was clumsy, it was terrible. It felt completely out of place and of course the team saw right through it right, They saw that that was me trying to be paul, right? And I promised myself in that moment that I would act in ways that was authentic to who I was and in that, you know, I didn't have to look far for models of that kind of leadership. My mom demonstrated that for me in my life, my aunties, I made sure I did my homework and got fed after school. Um my teachers who expanded the world for me, the community of leaders and and activists and movements that happened in the Oakland California, where I grew up all these different examples of leadership that, you know, right there for me. But what I have done is I had separate how I thought about how I need to show up and work from all of these examples of healthy mutual kinds of relationships that were affected in other areas of my life. I'm trying to bring that into how I thought about leadership. So my story actually begins on another coast um and quite different than cats. So I grew up the kid of two teachers of transcendental meditation in rural new Hampshire um on a dirt road in the trees. And my first educational experience was, and now I'm realizing it probably wasn't a school, it was actually probably just friends of my parents, uh fellow meditators, but my first experience was um learning in an intergenerational setting. Teachers did not have Mr and mrs, they were just fellow learners, kids of multiple ages, slightly running feral. Um, but I learned how to actually read and write by setting type and an old printing press. So we learned by doing and we learned collectively and collaboratively. We were a community that was supporting one another, enter public school at some point, kind of crashing into the realities of learning in a structured way, a hierarchical way. We're literally, each one of us were assigned a number. He knew exactly where you were in class. It was a winner take all mentality. It was competitive. Um it was killed the other one that taught me how to from a space of collectivism and interdependence. I learned how to become independent, I learned how to compete and I took that into my career over many years, which does not always create the kindest of interactions. I have spent my career actually unlearning those behaviors And it was not until arriving about 10 years ago, my partners where I found a community of fellow learners, fellow creators, fellow designers, in the business of designing vision futures and culture that actually restored connections between one another and leaned into interdependence versus just independent. Now this is not a binary. This is not an either or there is room and space for independence for hierarchy. For many of the ways that we've all learned how to be in the world, what cat and I are inviting us all into is what might interdependence and expanding the toolkit of ways of being with one another. Ways of designing companies, Ways of designing cultures, ways of designing products, services, interactions, teams. What might that look like? The pandemic, climate change, racial reckoning all of this has shown us we are in fact deeply interdependent. The things that we are facing now are much bigger than any one of us and a single team, any single company. But it's important I think for us to check in with ourselves because the stories and myths that Cat mentions the heroes that were brought up to revere, they are so deeply encoded enough. They shape how we lead, they shape how we act, they shape how we design. So I invite us and we will take 30 seconds so completely inadequate for the time. But this is in front of everybody just to reflect to a little bit of personal reflection. Right? Sketch. Think what does independence mean to you? What words come up do you think about that? What does interdependence mean to you? What words, thoughts and images come up when you think of that? What box do you operate more out of? Well, as Jessica said, this is certainly something we could spend very deep time on, but we're gonna share a little bit about what came up for Jessica and I as we were doing this together and we realized that we need to take a closer look, three kinds of shifts that happened between independence and interdependence and the first one being trussed. I'm going to share a quick reports analogy that hopefully, I think most, most folks have heard it's a bit risky for me using a sports metaphor on stage. Um, but I love, I do love the story of Michael Jordan's right? Like Michael Jordan joined the Chicago bulls and they were winning games. He was a star player. But it wasn't until Phil Jackson became coach in 1989 that they started winning championships. And it's because Jackson focused in on unifying the team as one team and rather than centering the plays around around Jordan's right And, you know, they went on to when they went on to win six championships subsequently. And you know, that that story for me triggers the question, you know, who do you trust and who do you interest? Who are the folks that you give the right work to the moments, key challenges? You know, do they play the same way that you do? Do they help you win? Right? And at what cost? And as we think about the shift between an independent mindset and the interdependence mindset here in the, in the visual, you know, think about trust in an independent mindset often there's a there's a protector for a savior. Somebody passed the ball to it's going to take it, take it down to the, but in our lives, you know, trust is formed is like a daily living practice, you know, the people you trust most you're in conversation with them frequently about the health of that trust in the same way, you know, trust in an interdependent and independent mindset is often defined by the rejection of others or the acceptance who's in who's out or being in contrast to something. Um and in an interdependent mindset, its really about recognizing ourselves and each other um finding that place of transparency, creating that and the authentic belonging that can come with it and we know when we feel that now the second shift that we're looking at is power. So an example here. So I'm also a writer, one of my heroes is Pellegrino Turri. I have his uh Patent drawing on my wall and um you know, Tori was Italian inventor, invented the first prototype of a typewriter in the 1940s and the 1830s. But what is little known is that he created that in partnership with the contessa Carolina fontana di Provenzano apologize, I didn't nail that totally, but they were very, very good friends with two of them and the contessa was blind and the very soul reason that they created that first prototype of the typewriter was so that she could offer her own letters when they were apart and wanted to communicate and I think about this story when I think about research in the ways that we engage stakeholders, the ways that we gain feedback on the evolution of our business, of our design, you know, who are those collaborators? What are the practices of that collaboration? Um what are the ways that we opened up for contribution? And what kind of contribution do we celebrate? Do we compensate kind of contributions? Do we credit, correct? So if you think about power of being derived often from the sense of hierarchy and position, um seniority in different ways, whether it's company or individuals. Yeah, Independent mindset kind of drives a sense of scarcity as well, how things need to be distributed fixed way. And the interdependence mindset, thinking about the relational capital that we're building every day where we're intentionally doing that with one another, certainly here and then how that spent when we think about different ways of framing the problems ahead of us and how that can actually create new kinds of abundance. Having a single authority for decision making and an independent mindset versus thinking about multi centered stakeholders where many different types of decisions can emerge. And uh favoring a single human lifetime is a trademark trait of an independent mindset as we see more and we've heard more here today and yesterday about favoring multiple lifetimes. What does it look like to look? Seven generations ahead expertise also is shifting the independent mindset privileges, knowledge and expertise as being recognized from without now I know there are many people in the medical profession here. I really want you to have diplomas and degrees and that expertise and standards. But there's also a shift to recognizing expertise um at the front lines, through experience, through the people who are having the day to day interactions with others. They hold wisdom, they hold knowledge, they hold solutions that inform the designs going forward. This is not a new idea, the innovation process um for many, many years and I'm sure everybody in this room has gone through. It actually goes out and collects insights from the front lines from people who are the direct users or customers. Um but it was often an extractive process. It was a way of gathering those insights, bringing them back into a centralized design process that then produced the answer or solution, what we're finding, working with our clients and particularly in retail hospitality and um companies that have people outside of headquarters and directly interacting with people in the world, is again tapping into their wisdom and involving them in the design process directly and the word co creation has been used multiple times today and yesterday I submit, we are very much at the beginning of what co creation actually looks like the design process and the ways in which we're used to engaging in it. I think it's going to be continued to radically shift as we keep going as we recognize expertise held by the many, not just a few. So we think about shifts and power trust shifts and power shifts and expertise. I want to leave you with a couple of questions. Beautiful questions to consider as you go back into your day, back into your team's, back into your company to the first who has the most to lose by a change you're considering, who has the most to gain. Just sit with that start recognizing the interconnections and interdependence. How can we engage unexpected expertise holders in that process? Who lightly consider um you who have you been overlooking? Who may you turn to? And then as cat began and that apple add that many of us grew up with and and love. But what are your go to stories of leadership and bold creativity? Do they celebrate the single hero? What are the stories that you tell yourself? What are the stories you tell your team? What values are encoded in those stories? They're the ones you want to be passing on? Are there other stories that we may bring into our repertoire as we think about ourselves as leaders, as we think about ourselves as designers creators? I really love that piece of thinking about it as an expanded toolkit. Alright, reflecting on what's there, reflecting on might be missing and then expanding from many different sources and as you know, we bring this back together, you know, it's it's just about constantly checking in with ourselves in those moments of just looking to what is the trust and power and expertise that already exists within the people that make our lives possible, right? In all the aspects. And in that this is where we start to design for interdependence. It's where we start to design for relationships that our mutual reciprocal healthy. And so, you know those myths, what are those myths in your days? What are the things that we tell ourselves that we tell our stakeholders? Um maybe knowingly or unknowingly and how those show up in different ways and in those moments when you see those, notice your body and notice your breath and in that place, that is where we can start to design with new and intentional declaration for our collective future. Thank you. Thank you.

Steve Johnson, Vice President, Product and Studio Design, Netflix
Rochelle King, Vice President, Creative Production, Netflix
In conversation with: Kate Aronowitz, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Building Diverse Teams 

Steve Johnson, Vice President, Product and Studio Design, Netflix
Rochelle King, Vice President, Creative Production, Netflix


Discussion Leaders: 
Dr. D’Wayne Edwards, President, Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design 
Doreen Lorenzo, Assistant Dean, School of Design and Creative Technologies, The University of Texas at Austin
Moderators: 
Jason Mayden, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design
Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Dialogue: Next Gen Design Leaders 

Discussion Leaders: 
Dr. D’Wayne Edwards, Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design 
Doreen Lorenzo,  The University of Texas at Austin


Design Dialogue: Next Gen Design Leaders 


Discussion Leaders: 
Dr. D’Wayne Edwards, President, Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design 
Doreen Lorenzo, Assistant Dean, School of Design and Creative Technologies, The University of Texas at Austin


Discussion Leaders: 
Dr. D’Wayne Edwards, President, Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design 
Doreen Lorenzo, The University of Texas at Austin


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Dialogue: Next Gen Design Leaders 


Phil Duncan, Chief Design Officer, Procter & Gamble
Ioana Matei, Head of Emerging/Immersive Technologies, Procter & Gamble

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing Our Digital Futures

let us cross into the digital realm. Uh some might think of the metaverse as the economic opportunity of tomorrow, but it has already spawned a thriving business according to Jpmorgan over $54 billion dollars is spent on virtual goods every year. That's almost as much as it's almost twice as much as the amount spent on buying music, consumer goods, titan. Procter and Gamble is not holding back their developing immersive virtual experiences to build lasting connections between younger consumers and they're leading brands earlier this year at C. E. S. P. N. G. Showcased their life lab metaverse like attraction developed by its design team in collaboration with the firms immersive technologies unit to share a PNG strategy for the metaverse and how they believe virtual experiences could drive real profits. Please welcome to the stage in real life not metaverse. Uh Phil Duncan, chief design officer at Procter and Gamble. And you wanna multi head of emerging immersive technologies at Procter and Gamble? Hi how are you? Thank you for being here. Thanks for having us. Okay so we're going to talk metaverse which is something we've all been hearing lots and lots about these days. But um I'm gonna gamble and say that probably Not everyone would expect, I believe 184 year old consumer goods company to be at the forefront of this new technology. So you know from a high level like why do you think the metaverse makes sense for PNG. Um Well um first and foremost I think anytime that there's a place where consumers are kind of gravitating towards, you know PNG has a terminology we like to use called constructive disruption, which is about, you know, frankly looking at the categories in which we compete and try to, you know, grow our businesses and and obviously win the hearts and minds of consumers where and how they're they're connecting with brands and learning about them is a natural place for us to go and learn about. So the metaverse, there's obviously a lot of buzz about it, um but we're clearly in a learning journey to understand again, what does engagement look like? How do we storytelling this space and ultimately, you know, how do we create value value for the consumer value for our retail partners? Um so it's a fantastic, you know, um opportunity to kind of keep our curiosity high and learn and create and do coming up with some of the themes over the course of the past day and a half or so, you want to, from the technical side, um did you kind of have to push for this or do you feel like, you know, people were ready to jump into this space? Well, I think, I mean if we think about the metaverse, it's a it's a very new concept that has been there for a while because the gaming industry has been there for a while, a RVR is there for a while, so we we experiment this at PNG for a long time, but the covid and the pandemic situation made it a bit more real for us to put it in practice and we had a bit more of an open mind and opportunity to to try it on and it really give ourselves the freedom to be like we want to learn with this and learn to see how what that gives us for our consumers and the people out there. Okay. Um I think we should look at, we have a video now which I think will help give people a little bit more of a sense of what you guys are doing. So it's it's hard to talk about the metaverse um without showing it right? Yeah. So you know if you guys want to give us some sense of what we're looking at, this was our physical installation at C. E. S going back about four or five years. So you can see how we built in things like engagement, showcasing our innovation and now we're stepping into our life lab virtually which we did for the first time two years ago, again showcasing the history of our company and the portfolio of the brands that we have um again, romancing individual innovation that our business teams were wanting to continue to showcase to consumers, to influencers even in the middle of the pandemic. And we had some gaming mechanics, so you could you could write are exploiting barge, let's for example and give points so we try to implement and make it attractive for for the young generation out there, but also showcasing the products. We had a collaboration with Bugatti which showcased the design of our Bugatti Gillette Razor and also you could talk with King C. Gillette from 100 more years ago in the space. We revived him as an avatar. So that was interesting for our viewers to have a chat with him. Ah and also we brought back the cavity creeps so I'm not sure people know about them in the child. So we redesigned them as a super heroes and give them a fresh new backstories and behind each of the hero, you have a mini game that was showcasing really oral health and engaging with the young generation in terms of teaching them what good oral health care is by playing these games. And uh and we we made the like little interactive interactive games that they could play in. We also brought together our citizenship efforts across sustainability. Um we also brought our olympics experience as covid, just absolutely ravaged particularly Tokyo olympics. We brought our customer partners to our engagement in Tokyo. So we brought Tokyo to them virtually to see how they could build collectively our business with them in and around the olympics. And then we just recently launched responsible beauty strategy as part of our total beauty portfolio in our beauty sphere, which is also a big part of what we launched um at and with the es so again we're stepping into this, you know, environment to learn and understand how to engage and what really matters with consumers and ultimately to create value. Um there's, I have so many questions, so that video, okay, first of all I want to, you can kind of tell in that that you have created a very different feelings for the different brands um which makes sense, you know, PNG is a company with, you know, dozens and dozens of brands with really distinct personalities. So how did you think about, you know, bringing that unique sort of brand look and feel to the different? I'm so confused about the terminology I should be using, it was interesting to step into this space and I have to, you know, give a lot of kudos to you wanna um she was my reverse mentor, which is also really funny to use even the word reverse, which is like, no, you were my mentor in this space, you know, you really taught me because as a designer, I kind of stepped into the space and I thought, gosh, how do you, you know, design in three dimensions to infinity. Um but then you really started, you know, thinking about what's the story I want to tell, What is the consumer attention that we're trying to solve? How do we bring to life the innovation that is unique within each of the ones that brands as you mentioned and then really frankly tried to um both celebrate the individual innovation yet rapid in a total experience which was the PNG life lab. So it's kind of a combination of working with our brand teams on what was that innovation and what would be unique to bring to life and to visualize and or storyteller around. But then also keep the equities of the physical PNG life lab as we moved into the virtual as well. So um you wanna the gaming part of it also really jumps out like you know the the teeth that we just saw talk a little bit like do you have a background in gaming? How did you think about approaching gaming in this context? So I think um for me and my team as well so we're kind of mixed. I'm coming as well for a background which I'm both I. T. And creative. I'm a professional filmmaker also have an NGO called woman in immersive technology. So I see a lot of creative content out there and I built my team to be both. So we have the game designers in the team but we also have a bit of not creating and storytelling because this is a new space. So nobody is really an expert and we need to bring this new generation uh to create. So that's that's a bit of background for for for myself. Um and also coming back on like how do we show the brands and how what changed that made when when I work with Phil and the team. Um we also thought like how, how a brand can be authentic in this space because we see that a lot of gaming platforms out there and a lot of executions. So what does it mean for us to be authentic? And I remember we're asking ourselves the questions because most of the characters, I mean you've seen cavity creeps, but if you think of ph and we have 180 plus years history, right? We have only two brands that have actually characters, which is Lenny, the bear, the charming bear and Mr Clean. So when you're talking to a brand, like how do you want to be represented in this space as a character? Like what does it mean? So even that question is really like, oh, how do I show up in this space is in a meaningful and interesting way. It's like almost like um you know, it's probably a good brand building exercise anyway, right? Like if you're brand we're a character, you know, who would they be? Um One of the stats I saw that I thought was interesting and you guys can correct me if I have, if I'm wrong about this, I believe you said that the average amount of time people spent in the life lab was something like around 20 minutes? Um I can't remember the last time I sent website, so I think that there's some obvious opportunity, they're like, what do you see that unlocking for PNG. Yeah, I mean it's it's it was maybe more overly surprised about it, but 2028 minutes um year on year as we went from year one to year two of executing this, people stayed even longer. So um that was a bit of a shock to us and a lot of our business teams were looking at this thing to your point. You know, our consumers would maybe spend five minutes on a brand website, but suddenly you're enveloping them in the story. Um those avatars were real people and innovators. So one of the dynamics that we did from a design standpoint was built on a gaming engine, so we could have that interaction. So you could literally talk to the innovators who developed the oral B io or the Gillette exfoliating razor, which at first people, when you started talking to them in the metaverse, people were like, are you a bot? Like, you know, I'm sitting in my basement in Cincinnati Ohio, I've been talking to you or I'm sitting in Portugal with, you know, until our people's accents came through and their ethnicities and diversity of our company really came through in this space. So I think it just provided a really rich engagement that went well beyond us pitching the product proposition into teach me about this, but why were you so passionate about this space when you develop it? I mean the articles that were written coming off this from a press standpoint, whatever, because we had our authentic innovators, the people that were really behind the products was incredibly rich. So um I'm gonna see if we have any questions in a minute, but consider whether you have some metaverse questions to ask, but um I'm also thinking about you know, how this helps you guys engage with the younger generation um of people that maybe didn't grow up with your products or obviously there's a lot of competition in your space um these days, so you know, you wanna, were you, did you think specifically of how younger people are going to engage with this and you know, our things sort of targeted towards a younger demographic. So I think whenever we we look at execution in the metaverse, we really need to start with the audience in mind. So the one you saw is really designed for a CS event where we showcase our brands, We're working as well on executions for young generation and what we want to do and and there's been a lot of talk as well as this conference about co creation and community, right? So for us to be able to be relevant in that space, we need to create the community or be part of the young generation community, which is a very new space as well in this gaming, the gaming is doing this very well, right? So we do that and we we also try to as much as we can now and it's it's evolving and I think that there is a change in the industry as well create with young generation, so we have that in mind but we need to be where they are and think how they think for this to be relevant for them, that makes sense. Um let's see, do we have any questions in the room? I see a hand back here. Yeah, quarters into the metaverse about six different platforms and we settled on Mozilla hubs. Okay, um I love the cinematography and everything that you had in your demo, what gaming platform are you using? That is unreal engine, game platform and its web stream. So we also sort of accessibility because we can also play it in the gear and all close gears and so on but that will not be accessible to everybody. So this is a web based streaming or real game engine and we chose this as well because of the graphics quality. It was important for our brands being like the company we are and looking at our ads and our marketing execution was important for our brands to be showcased in that graphics quality that was relevant for us and we could express the full brand narrative. So you have the choice of the platform. Thank you. Welcome. Um I have a question about metaverse skeptics um there might be some in the room, any any any like self declared metaverse skeptics out there. I am sometimes, so I'm just curious like using people that are like oh the metaverse, I'm already spending so much time in virtual world, like do you think like do they have a point? Do they not understand something about the metaverse? Is there some some disconnect or some way you would say? Like here's why the metaverse is worth your time, I'll start, I'll be curious to see how you and I answer this was great. Um Again I think this is a space where the unknown around value creation, I mean we have a we have a saying of PNG around being a force for growth and a force for good. Um and so the very first part of that is intentional about we can't be a force for good if we aren't growing, so can the metaverse help us do just that. Um to be determined right? I think the value is like the value building aspect of this, a lot of noise, A lot of you know, talk about it right now on a on a number of impressions probably way higher than the actual, you know, value that's being extracted out of it. But again um we see this as another transformative platform that's going to really change the way consumers engage with brands eventually, so we're in to learn. Yeah, yeah, you wanna you have thoughts on that one. Sure, I think the the minutes to the end, so what we're trying to do here is to learn and these technologies allows us really to learn and there are three things for me that we can learn, right? One is the fact that is a creator economy, right? So we see on generation creating out there, we see them operating in the community. So how do we learn how to do that regardless if we all have a fully immersive experience, tiktok, whatever like this is something that we need to learn and put ourselves out there. We also, what this technology provides is really putting the consumer at the center because if you're looking at the two D executions like to the film flat, you are directing, right? So you as a director, you're directing the viewer how they're seeing here, you're creating a world and they interact the way they want to and that puts them in the center of the experience and that, that connection with your brand and what you're showing them is so much more powerful and that's the skill that we still need to learn, what does it mean? And how do we create for that being with this technology or any other that come? I think that's kind of this design principles and the way we design the user journey is so different. Um, I would think we have time for one more question and we have one over there just hit the santos with signified lighting. Um I'm also probably like many other, a little bit critical about metaverse, but suddenly something you said, I wanted to ask if this makes sense. The food designers, We keep on having this sometimes difficulty in reaching out to users and customers and do proper user research and all that you talked about from five minutes to 28 minutes of engagement. Could designers look at metaverse is just the next frontier and next platform for doing user and customer research a place where you can go play and learn in a direct access. I mean does that make any sense at all? I think it absolutely does. I mean as you want to mention, I mean I think part of it is acknowledging that it's a community based world out there. I mean our brand teams I think are really kind of learning, whereas before we used to build like brand guidelines and we were the stewards know suddenly the community becomes the steward of the experience, so tapping them with understanding what would be a relevant way to intercept them I think is a fabulous way to use the metaverse from a learning standpoint. So I would, I would unequivocally answer yes. Um that is, I think a great place to end, especially given this room full of designers, so hopefully we'll get a lot more designers in the metaverse, Thank you both, thank you so much

Presenter: George Aye, Co-founder and Director of Innovation, Greater Good Studio

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: that Quiet Little Voice - When Design & Ethics Collide

Brainstorm Design 2022 - When Design & Ethics Collide


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: that Quiet Little Voice - When Design & Ethics Collide


while human centered design works well in commercial context things can go wrong when designers failed to adapt it before employing it in the social sector, irrespective of good intentions. It can even exacerbate the underlying problem the designer was seeking to address when helping clients. Designers should ask different questions because the ultimate goal is to improve someone's life in our next design talk, Georgia lays out the perils of designing without moral guardrails and share some questions designers should ask themselves when design and ethics collide. Please welcome to the brainstorm design stage George. I co founder and director of innovator, Greater good studio. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Um it's such a pleasure to be here in person and to not be on zoom. So I would encourage everyone to remember that you don't have to take yourself off mute in order to have some auditory feedback. If you want to order big last gasp at any moment, please do. It will be really appreciated. Also I was remembering that this conference is called embracing radical transformation. So one of the tiny ways that could be a little radical in this moment is to ask for permission to go beyond the 30 minutes I've been given um well you see there was a gospel And I'm going to ask the powers that be if I can do so and that means not asking fortune although I appreciate being a bad guest like this but ask the room do I have your permission to go over just a tiny bit than the allotted 13 now. Under 12 minutes. Yes, thank goodness. So um I want to just check to see how many people here are familiar with the term human centered design. Imagine a bunch, can you raise your hands, how this is gonna go? Great, good, thank you. Um if you're not familiar with human centered design, I'm gonna hopefully go to the next slide. This diagram shows a number of cute color graphics that described the process of humans in the design that starts with like framing problems, understanding humans and then designing responses towards them and that kind of makes sense. And I want to share this amazing story of how human centered design changed the lives of millions of people around the world, particularly young people and I want to do so because it starts with two designers from stanford Montes and Bowen approached focus on campus and asked them what they loved and hated about their habits about smoking. The complaints were consistent fear of being seen with a cigarette and paranoia about smelling of smoke on the first date. Isn't that a good insight? The first prototypes were adult assemblies of bespoke components and items found on drug store shelves. If you follow along the widow's beats, they've really nailed it. They handled human centered design exactly as taught to them and exactly as we promote and tell the world we do, we understand the problem, understand human insights and respond Unfortunately this is where sort of things go a little awry because what they then created in their journey to design a product to help them quit smoking was this little guy, the dual e cigarette, look how cool that is tiny. And what's fascinating about the jewelry cigarette is that it's so uh problematic and attractive That it was valued around about $38 billion dollars when they got acquired by Altria because they were found that they wanted to add it to their addiction portfolio alongside Marlboro and in the most hilariously predictable way. They also started posting jobs for a director of corporate social responsibility two, I'm sure helped them understand how they could perhaps make amends. Can you imagine working on projects like that? Woof, it breaks the question, how did we lose our way, what system and what series of different failures had to happen with that kind of product that I'm holding in my chest bacchanal can exist in the world and being essentially like a massive public health scourge without repercussion. Now, it's not as a design as a single monolithic block. It has adapted and diverged over many, many ways over decades. It's a very divergent process and it's not as though we actually don't already have standards for good practice. Um, there are many out there, but my go to as a design professor is to look at the 10 principles for good design from dieter rams, I think others of what he referenced hair. Um, and you know, he's a bit of a hero to me and what's fascinating is that if you look at this product, this would pass every test That the 10 principles with administer Look even number six good design is honest and this will honestly kill you. We have a craft based framework for good design. We don't actually, that's not a concern anymore and hasn't been, what we lack is an ethical based framework for good design and to keep relying on craft and harping on about craft is actually not acknowledging the problem that we have. I've been really fortunate that for the last, coming on 11 years to be the co founder and director of innovation at greater good studio were based in Chicago and we work exclusively with nonprofits, foundations and government. And in doing so, we've been brought on to look at any number of different complex social issues, some of which are listed here. They wrote the classics. They're persistent, evergreen and awful. But we feel lucky to be invited those conversations because they think they're really important. Now you would think that with us coming into these spaces that either our clients or our studio would have this ethical framework. I mean, why am I on the stage of not having one of those? But it turns out we don't, we have proxies, we make stuff up all the time and that makes us, I think a real liability in some of these very complicated spaces. I think it makes designers a real liability in these complex social spaces. The clients we work with are building towards an equitable society. So it's greatly important to us that we treat them with both care and respect, which is why it's been so motivating for us to kind of like develop systems for ourselves. But in almost every design firm I've ever worked and every design I've ever met at the individual level, I find that this has been true. It is a B Y O E scenario, Bring your own ethics that is not good enough for an industry. It is remarkable. We've got this far, B Y. E. It can't cut it, which means that we can be quite dangerous in some scenarios without an ethical framework. We have the opportunity to understand from our users and we run the risk of exploiting them. Instead, we have the opportunity with designed to redistribute power or without an ethical framework. We run the risk of concentrating it as we tend to do without an ethical framework. We have the opportunity to prevent new social issues, but we end up running the risk or simply Ameliorating them. We could be doing so much more. And one of the proxies that a reference is this quite a little voice that I've had and I know for a fact, all of you have I have not met a single working professional designer who has not had this conversation with themselves, but the competition will flare up in the worst time. Thank you and I myself, I'm mad at myself and how much you've done that I failed. So that means that that that the conditions by which you go don't blow it, You've got a good thing here, don't blow. It is absolutely present in that industry. Uh this may be hard to read, but these are 10 moments when that quite a lot of voices come up to my head. Um I love it. If you maybe want to take a photo, I'd love to talk to you at the at the bar afterwards, because I'm definitely gonna need a drink after this and talk to you about when the times that you've had that quiet little voice come up and what you did in that situation, I'm not going to shame you at all, far from it, but I want to talk about how we can tackle that without having the counter narrative, which is in all our studios that tell us our industry has trained us to say yes typically around how much we can do it and when we can do it by we have very little training on how to say no. It is an absent, conspicuously absent component of our design education. And I think part of the reason why it is so is because we so rarely talked about this notion of Power and we've heard a few times referencing it and I want to actually define it because I think the way Power gets discussed perhaps by designers is that well someone else has it? I don't Or is that the thing that maybe president binder has and is discussing with other world leaders and I think that's true, but I want to bring it down to a scale that's a little more interpersonal. Let me share this definition from my co founder that power is the ability to change another person's reality. And when you think about that for a minute, because there are probably times when your reality got completely changed for months at a time because of an email or text or some notes alongside this definition for Power is the idea of power asymmetry and the idea that often lopsidedness in power is often how things go that distribution is often kind of concentrated with small number versus the masses. So to kind of hone this in a little further, I'm going to visualize with a basic triangle and made in keynote. Okay, can I ask anybody here in the room, have you ever had a project and from the very 1st 2nd you hear about you go I'm screwed. I'm never getting out of this alive. The budget doesn't make sense. I don't understand who this team is, what this is like the schedule is off. How do they expect me to be successful? Anybody had a thing like that. I think my whole career was spent doing that. So what that means and this is why the triangle makes sense. That is you on the sharp pointy end of that triangle. Does that help you make? Does that help you feel it? That means that somebody somewhere in the world on the wide end applying that pressure. Now some classical asymmetric relationship exists in the world. And here are just a few law enforcement with detainees, doctors and patients, employees and employees funded through grantees, teachers with their students, landlords with renters, local government with community leadership with their front line staff. These are almost pre scripted asymmetric relationships. You have to take a lot to fight that Now along the spectrum between the pointy end to the wide end guess where greater good studio shows up along that it was painful to have to admit how far over to this wide end we actually are. We don't get projects unless we are aligned with those with great power. Which means we run the risk of every time we do a project of working in the shadow of our clients Asymmetry, we can actually make things worse just by showing up. And just because we said yes, the project. I'm wondering if some of you go, oh yes, there was a project. I did. Mm hmm. I love this quote from Alice walker, the most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any. That's what was trained into me maybe because I'm an immigrant? Maybe because I was always the lowest young, youngest and lowest person on the totem pole at everywhere I worked. But it behooves those with power to remind you don't have any. So one of the most disruptive ways of trying to maybe disrupt how its symmetry works. It's saying no to refuse it to disrupt it to to um challenge how it's being prescribed. So we gut check all of our projects and all of the new business development. Every monday we operationalized as part of our culture To try to see if we can challenge the notion of how power was distributed to us as a design studio. That's only 12 people in Chicago And over the last 10 years while I'm really proud of the portfolio projects we've done. It's the 50 plus break up emails that I'm really proud about. The breakup emails in like it's not you, it's me. I'm really sorry we can't do this with the single largest breakup being for U. S. A. I. D. For $2 million. Which means I'm I feel confident up to $2 million. I can turn it down if it's two billion and one who knows what I'll do. But I feel like I've been tested up to that much. So design I would argue has some issues. So without deliberate intervention it's designed really serves society. So when we think about introducing design to social issues, I want to be sure. Is that really the right approach that has a direct impact on our business. For sure. But it's not about whether greater good should do it, but rather whether we should be having designers in the room at all, Design primarily has served two goals. And I think that without acknowledging this, we are pretending it isn't happening. Design build capital and seeks comfort. Kind of reminds me of this conference actually both things are happening at the same time and that comfort seeking competitive design means that we'd rather not say anything. I think the design could be doing so much more and you can't remember the last several years now we've had people whining like little toddlers. We weren't designed at the table designed at the table. We were so ready to get design at scale. We never stopped to wonder if perhaps weeks causing harm at scale in that rush to get to 1000 designers. 1,510,000 designers. Oh sure. What it is with scaling should happen. What is preventing us from causing more harm? And I would argue that every major brand has a dark side that has been brought to you by design were an accelerant to those social problems. Sorry to be such a downer. And at this point, I think design leadership, Well, it might be hopefully trying to say I didn't know like some sort of like naivety, but I think there is a willful ignorance at this point, it's no longer really capable of pretending it isn't happening. We're not going to begin our mindset our way through this, it's time to grow up. And I think what we part of what the issue is that our design culture is set by what we celebrate the all the awards that we drive for the all the recognition. I wish there was an award for the projects we've turned down. That was really hard to visualize. Which is why I try to make these little boxes with squares that are dashed lines, but that would at least have some recognition for the effort it takes to turn things down. But what if saying no wasn't just a choice you made because you know, you have to run the risk of looking difficult. What if it wasn't about just a personal choice anymore? Was something a little bigger? Whatever you said, there was a system of accountability similar to the ones we have in many other professional organizations, other professions that we are adjacent to. From medicine to law. Even architecture, heck even real estate agents have to get a license. Are we about that? What if we had a code of ethics? What if as an industry we had a shared set of understandable practice. What if we had to be licensed and accredited? What if we needed continuous education in order to qualify and earn that right to do this work and others, there are things that are already established in any other industry, Many industries and architecture being our closest brethren. Why not in design across the board. Now, I can understand if perhaps you think that well that's just going to make it harder to become a designer. And I I agree I don't think design needs more gatekeeping, but I do think we need more accountability. Some recourse if things go awry recourse if julie cigarette happens again for another community and you could say I don't want to participate in that. That sounds too expensive. Really annoying and slow. You're right. It is, it's gonna suck. But there will be a bifurcation I believe for those who are going to practice this type of accountability and will serve a clientele that is seeking the accountability and then there will be those who will not, that will probably be okay. But over time, just like architecture, I don't know if anybody can actually build a building anymore without having a licensed architect. I'm sure there are some that that won't. So I want to just peek a little into the future because I think we're so close now because it's it's not it's actually not that far off. I want to share with you this social change by design database that is a listing and if you it's a long billy address. But if you take a look, it shares a database that myself and others Other moderators developed that has over 200 organizations. That is the future of this industry. Perhaps getting us closer to this accountability that we have been talking about. These are design organizations that have designed themselves differently to push back this counter narrative that they've been taught when they were growing coming up, just like I was, I'm proud to be amongst this list, but I'm also proud to help curate it because I want to show what it could look like and to show in which ways how design could do something a little more. Perhaps we could use design to build power and perhaps were designed to seek truth. We have everything we need. If only there was like profession of like people who could handle ambiguity and be creative when push comes to shove. Oh man, wouldn't that be great? We're so close to have this future. And I think it will likely happen if we just stop the and listen to that quiet little voices inside all of us. Thank you for letting me go over

Katie Dill, Head of Design, Stripe;
Janaki Kumar, Head of Design, Commercial Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co; 
In conversation with: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Redesigning Finance

when polled a few americans might say they love their bank. Traditional banks have had difficulties deploying new technology at scale and despite investments in mobile banking, some continue to lose clients to neo bank. As financial services undergo a digital transformation. What role should designers play? Design executives from two different financial firms are here to share how they are creating value added products and compelling customer experiences. Please welcome Jon AKI Kumar, head of design commercial bank Jpmorgan and Chase Katie Dill, head of design at stripe and joining them on stage is brainstorm design co chair Ryan. Mhm. Then alright as Kristin said, two very different kinds of financial companies. We're we're here to talk about redesigning finance. We have one of the biggest banks in the country and and a growing large fintech but coming coming up the same problem or the same challenge from different directions. I'll start with you johnny key when people think of like you know Chase or any kind of big you know, traditional banking company, they don't necessarily think of design or design culture. So and especially commercial banking, tell us how what the real story is on the inside. What is the challenge to build that culture. Thank you for that question. The fact that people don't think that there is design is the very reason we need design and more designed. Right? I think um the commercial banks of small businesses all the way to large businesses and different verticals and um it's really vital that they are the recipients of great design and what happens inside this organization as um the mission that are set for our team is a humanized financial services. So what we've observed in this, you know, very large and successful bank is that there are world class experts in different financial products, whether it's card or line of credit Treasury services, um and so many others. Right? But there there is a the role of design is to tell the story of the client and help us bring together the right products and services in service of the client. So that's essentially how we are trying to transform commercial bank. I think that such a common problem for big legacy companies that have developed so much expertise and develop product lines to satisfy all kinds of niche, you know, use cases and everything and there was no, it wasn't it wasn't not built at once. It was built piecemeal. So that problem of just asking questions probably is the beginning part of it, but like how do you, do you know, what's an example of how you can take uh design your your design team and go into one of those scenarios and make it more seamless, especially to the customer coming in to try to make sense of what you're offering them. Yeah, I think internally we start with storytelling right, we tell the stories of our clients, we put the products in context of what the client's needs are and what other, you know, conflicting priorities or other considerations they may have as they are trying to access the banking products and I think that just the storytelling helps people empathize with the clients and that's already a great start. And um yeah, and then you know, we try to really use language we have, you know, not just interaction designers, visual designers, we also have copywriters. So we try to make sure that we speak to the user in every way possible so that we can connect our financial products and services to their needs. How big is your team and how much has it grown and you know, how much, how much do you have to lobby? Uh you know Jamie Diamond to give you more resources? Yeah, so I know, I think to, to be, to be fair to jpmorgan is a huge organization and I'm only part of commercial bank, there is Consumer Bank Investment Bank and in fact those design organizations are larger than ours. Um commercial bank is small but mighty and growing. Um and I'm 60 at the moment and we are constantly growing. So you're if you were speaking to Jamie you'd say you need you need more people. I mean honestly everybody knows how hard it is to hire talent. So um I I just want to make sure that we, you know most of my job is setting up the environment where design can succeed, right? It's I don't really believe in just throwing resources without fully creating the consideration the environment for success. So one of the other aspects of the product experts that I spoke about earlier, they call themselves product managers or product owners, right? But we all know when we're creating digital products, that's, that's a whole another skill sets that's needed to be a product owner in that environment. So we are also kind of trying to create training curriculums for product owners so that they can be excellent stakeholders for us and also creating a platform mindset, going to Fin techs of the world where we don't have to build every single capability ourselves, right? We if we create a platform, we can also partner and leverage some of the skill sets that are around us. And at the end of the day it's all about the clients. So let's transition to Fintech, let's, we'll go to Katie. So um I mean I just want to start with you on the fact that you actually are relatively new at strike because you, you joined, I think you said last March and you've worked previously at Airbnb En left. So two very well known apps that probably everybody here has used their very consumer focused. So what was it like to go from those two incredible experiences to a company that's uh that's more enterprise focused, that's not a, you know, individual consumer focused company. Yeah, you know March last year and boy time moves very strangely these days. Uh so uh it has gone by in a blink, but I feel like a lot has changed at the same time moving into stripe, which for me was different from one, it was, you know, it's in the financial space to, it is mainly be to be focused of course, uh you know, it was definitely a bit of a learning curve. Uh I think some of the things that made it easier for me to move into was the fact that I had already been in these hyper growth technology based companies. So I'm used to a lot of change, I'm used to things growing pretty fast but what was very interesting and as we're moving into the B two B space of course is the role of sales uh in the way that our relationships with our users are at a whole nother level, you know, these are users are for the most part businesses, businesses of all sizes could be a startup of one person or it could be a fortune 50 like amazon and can we just pause this for people who probably have heard of stripe but don't really fully know how it works like what is the biggest source of revenue for you guys? Like how does you know what's the model, like how would you sum it up well where it all started with payments taking payments online, helping companies actually get their businesses going and take payments online. That was 10 years ago we now have, I think over 14 different products that have evolved and and and built off of that initial colonel. But the whole idea is that we're helping businesses start and grow their organization largely built on financial infrastructure and the businesses that we serve our of all different sizes, many of them are helping direct customers, but many of our businesses are also just helping other businesses like Shopify and these organizations are you know, looking to us to help them achieve their goals and their opinionated about it as they should be. These products that we build for them, you know, make or break, you know, their their business success. This could be their dream company that they always wanted to start. And so of course they have really strong conviction on what they're looking for and there, you know, informed and they have good reason to, you know, essentially have influence on what we build. So our in many ways that we interact with them through user research of course through support through sales through any number of means, including just directly emailing us and telling us what they think, which we crave. We love this uh really helps to inform the work we do. And that was different coming from the consumer company where yes, you might have millions using your product every day and you have, you know, maybe get support interactions or twitter interactions, but it's a very different relationship uh and I am seeing that now and I'm seeing the benefits of the fact that we have, you know, sales for example, helping inform the work that we do. It's like we have this like army of researchers kind of like googled us an army of researchers to help us build better products. Yeah, I just remind everybody raise your hands if you have questions, we have mix and we'll, we'll get to you. So you, you had some news today, you announced some Katie, some new product offerings. Do you want to tell us, give us the highlights of that? Yes, yes at noon Eastern Standard time today we had our event stripes sessions where we launched a lot of new things. The big thing that I'm very excited about is the stripe app marketplace. So now third parties, uh, you know, various businesses of all sizes can build apps into the stripe dashboard and really what we're doing there is we're basically joining forces with other organizations to improve the experiences of our various business users. So if you're running a business, let's say you are, you know, a plumber and you're, you know, doing various types of things. You don't want to go to seven different products to manage your business, one to do payments, one to do taxes, one to do revenue recognition, I want to do your support calls, whatever it might be, these are a lot of things that you're trying to manage and so what we're seeing is an opportunity to bring these things closer together kind of like as you talked about the importance of ecosystem and you know, recognizing where your expertise are, but also you know, creating moments of uh interlock between other organizations so that can be better for them. So for example, one of the apps that we launched or we'll be launching in the next couple of weeks uh is with Dropbox, so if you're running a business and you're doing various payments related work within stripe, but you want to file that away in a certain folder, for example, in your dropbox account. Now it's all linked up. You don't have to be like switching between various tabs or various apps. So it's really about just bringing, you know better user experiences, things that we all as humans expect, right? You can order and get your groceries on your doorstep in an hour. You know, these are people that are also running their businesses and want that same kind of access and instantaneous help with what they're doing Janicki you know, we were talking backstage about um you're you're mentioning the example of somebody coming to chase for alone and then realizing the opportunity there strikes me as from a, you know, from your own different point of view, similar kind of thinking about building blocks on top of the original, you know, services that you're providing and just being able to first of all recognize what clients might want and then deliver on that, but could you just kind of walk us through like you know what what this process was of realizing this opportunity and then how you address that, you know absolutely, you know, very similar lines of thinking, right? How do we serve the client more holistically? Um so in this, in this particular case that I was describing to you, it's a case of commercial real estate, you know, there are landlords who may have a small building or a large building and Chase or JPMorgan Chase traditionally gives loans to them to buy this building. Right? And when we spoke, we did ethnographic research and spoke to all the bankers who interact with these clients and ask them what do you do? And they are on the phone a lot with these clients who are asking them a whole host of questions. Should I buy this building, Do you think that you know the net operating income, is that going to be okay? Is that is that neighborhood? You know, doing well. Should you know, my water heater has broken, do you know a good contractor, I'm paying X amount for my insurance. Is that too much? You know, so they're asking all of these questions and also they need to know, you know, they need to collect rent And as we know the world is not all digital right? There are still people who are collecting checks and whatnot and they have to run behind their tenants and you know, there's, there's a lot of complexity in our small business owners hands and property owners tenants. So, what, what we did was we unpack that and we told the story of this property investor and we told them, okay, roughly how much of it. So you got a loan from Chase. So how much is that? How, how much percentage of that contributes to your success? And they said 5% Getting alone is 5% but the 95% means I have to buy the right building. I have to get the income from my tenants. I have to do all the other things that I have to do. And so that's how it we asked them, you know, and, and the client managers don't have the, um, don't have the time to give that level of dedicated support to all the clients. Right. So we are saying, how do we democratize that level of support to everyone? And we can use technology for good here. We can make every, every property investor successful because they have the right numbers, they are investing in the right buildings, they're setting the right rent and they're doing their business in a healthy way. And ultimately, you know, what, I was struck by joining Chase, is that how purpose driven, uh, the organization is, and we can make a direct correlation to the availability of affordable housing in urban areas by helping our property investors be successful, right? Because availability of affordable housing is a supply problem. There's plenty of demand. We just need to get the supply up and running and that's what we're all about. What portion of the business you're doing in the commercial bank now is like fully digitized. Do you know? It is, you know, so there are platforms of different legacy platforms and one of the it hasn't been built with that platform mindset that we we mentioned. So part of our journey is really bringing some of these technologies together, but we are investing in a whole new set of technologies to just make it modern and modular and ecosystem based and so on. Just you mentioned that um, I just wanted to bring this up also that, that uh the executives still get questions from Wall Street about why you're investing so much in technology, which I find hilarious in 2022 when uh, that's not a question you would ever get uh you know, why are you investing so much here in technology? But everybody wants to have seamless digital experience, you know, where are we gonna get that if we don't build it? Right. So, um, I wanted to ask you guys both about trust a little bit um, you know, the the giant bank that handles your money that you know, trust is imperative and and people forgive a little friction if they feel like they can trust it with stripe. You know, they want, as you mentioned, they want that instant, you know, service, but they also don't want to sacrifice on trust so and security of their transactions and just Katie, I'm just curious like um you know, coming in For you, working on designing these, these B2B experiences where it's a different trust obviously and what you were doing before it left paramount, but different experience now. So how do you build that into the design process? Oh yes, trust is critically important. I mean, I think the interesting thing about the work that we do is that one, it's a novel experience oftentimes right that people are not necessarily experts in managing their finances or you know, maybe even, you know, different stages in their business organization, they don't necessarily have the expertise and the type of work that we do, so it's new to them, secondly, it's extremely important and that thirdly it is, you know, frankly pretty personal as well, you know, a lot of the organizations that we work with might be startups as mentioned, but all the way up to larger organizations and so when we are designing that experience, we have to be also sensitive to all of that, right? Because you are talking to somebody who's maybe an expert in their field, but that doesn't mean they're an expert in finances and you want to make sure that you're communicating to them clearly, uh but also with the level of transparency that can help to earn and burn that urn and leverage that trust and then thirdly maintaining it. So, you know, I think probably we both in our work care a lot about the details and the excellence to craft, but it's a business imperative well beyond the things that you know, people in the past have taken, you know granted for because it's those little things also that helped to maintain that trust, like if we can't dial in that experience, then you you're gonna wonder what's happening under the hood for example, and I think when we're talking about, you know, kind of the meld of, you know, finance and technology, uh you know, we're seeing it both ways, right that there are aspects to uh finance that technology companies are bringing into their everyday, we, you know, are we refer to it as banking as a service. But for example, Shopify is you know, one of the users that we worked really closely with and for the last couple of months they've been offering Shopify balance, which is essentially banking as a service where they can provide for the merchants a you know, they can do loans, they can do, you know, issuing credit cards or cards such that these businesses can use the money where they're making it and really streamlining that whole experience. And so, you know, I think of, you know, the type of work that my team does is it's just these many degrees of separation within this larger ecosystem. We're trying to build the right thing for Shopify, who's building the right thing for their merchants, who are building the right thing for their users. And so this ripple effect, you know, has gotten to a whole nother level of complexity in trying to understand who your users are and designing something truly great such that it feels dialed in and earn their trust. Yeah, I have a different lens on the trust issue. I think people do trust, uh, chase or JPMorgan and that trust is not misplaced. The reason why I say that is as designers, when you work in a large financial institutions and some of you may know what I'm talking about. Their legal and compliance have an equal stake at the table when we're designing experiences and you know, as as a designer, it may feel like a burden. It may feel like, oh, there's one more person I have to check. I cannot just take a cloud product and integrated into my intimate, they have to go through a very rigorous process. Right? So what I have, our team has done is integrated legal and compliance Partners into our design process. So I have what we call the 5D design process and they have a seat at the table. So we share our early designs with them. We tell them the story of the user and why we need to do it this way. And I think this in a way my legal and compliance friends are very receptive, you know, so they want to be involved, they want to be engaged. And uh, so that, that one other dimension that, that differentiates right Working in Fintech causes a large bank. It may feel a little bit slower, but I think at the end of the day it's the price you pay, but also on behalf of the playing, thank you so much to both of you for sharing all the exciting stuff you're doing in the traditional world of banking and the world of Fintech join me in thanking him.

Joanna Peña-Bickley, Chief Design Officer, Design Corps; Head of Research and Design, Alexa Devices, Amazon
Rachel Bickley, Musician and Sound/Audio Designer, Designedbyus.org 
In conversation with: Kate Aronowitz, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design

Brainstorm Design 2022 - The Rise Of The Design Apprentice

creating a pipeline of next generation designers is a critical task for all of us. I hope all the young up and becoming potential designers, their ears are all ringing after the past few days um design apprentice programs can really help widen the pool of designers needed to help power what some observers are actually calling the fourth industrial revolution. And this is characterized by a range of technologies using the physical, digital and biological world. We're now going to hear from a civic minded civic media and public service design cooperative leading opportunities for underrepresented communities and we're also going to learn about the ambitious apprentice program of a private sector tech titan. Please join me in welcoming Joanna pena bickley, the chief design officer of design core and head of research and design at Alexa devices from amazon and Rachel bickley, a musician. Sound audio designer at design by us dot org. Thanks for joining. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us at the moment Joanna. So you're here wearing two hats today, um you're both representing designed by us and amazon. Can you tell us a little bit about both your roles and the more specifically explain what designed by us is. Absolutely. So let me start with Amazon, that's the easy one in the room. So I am the head of research and design for Alexa devices at amazon and that covers all of the disciplines of design from uh industrial design all the way to design tech and of course all of our voice skills for Alexa. So we do both the hardware and software. Um if I put on the other hand for a second, which is entrepreneur, which is what it takes to actually survive at amazon um is roughly about two years ago, I saw a need in the workforce that we weren't necessarily reaching diverse crowds and all of the same tricks like internships, uh and maybe even forgive me, but even conferences like this was just not doing enough. Um and one of the things was I actually partnered up with a number of organizers who said, you know, one of the things that we're missing in this growth of a pipeline is actually thinking about kinesthetic learning. So kinesthetic learning happens to be an apprenticeship and in many professional fields, not just technical fields, but in professional fields, for instance, like medicine, um architecture, last speaker was just talking about is one of them. Um these uh apprenticeships already exist and it is learning through doing learning through making, and I got to thinking um and with my daughter, Rachel and a number of other folks. So what if we could actually create a program that went, not just to college students because we're doing that, we do that with internships and there's still not enough diversity in that pipeline? What if we went to underrepresented high schools uh and go in and bring design there and the first thing that we really needed to do was the homework and the research behind one was an apprenticeship, right, what does that even mean? Um and then go take a look at other countries uh to see how their programs worked. And so we um Sweden Switzerland. Um We're the model in which we first kind of discovered that design is taught in kindergarten. Let me say that again because I think it's really important design and problem solving. So we think about that is taught in elementary school and it is core curriculum, it is not necessarily an elective, which it is here in this country. Um So when we understood that there were already programs and says, I think well what we needed to do was learn through observation and see how these programs run and then begin to develop something that we could use here as a mechanism for women and girls in the areas of science, technology, engineering, arts, math and design. What we call steamed. Yeah, I love the that we've now got a d on the end of steam which I love so important tactic. Yeah, yeah. And so that's designed by us that is designed by us. And so it started with a question of what if. Um and you know, two years later we have launched a design core which is a global design core. And really the mission of the organization is bringing gender equity uh and actually to accelerate gender equity into the global workforce. Uh And we're doing that by we initiated design core which is made up of distinguished designers apprentices in which we employ and we put them in action learning programs, those action learning programs deal with everything from uh solving really tough problems in climate uh to during the pandemic around PPE um to uh to creating audio audio based programs like the design by podcast and helping uh you young people just learn how to develop these hard and soft skills in a vocational way and teaching them and certifying them to go out and learn programming. For instance, when we were doing 100 million mask Mayday, we had to specifically myself had to learn G code, which is the coding language for three d printers, something I had no experience in. So I had to immerse myself and educate myself and get ready to teach others. So then they could learn and they could then go out and manage and teach others as well and create that kind of this system where we continuously teach and educate and create curriculums that are open source and available for all. Yeah, I love hearing about that because it occurred to me as we were getting prepared for the talk, I'm like, what's the difference between an apprenticeship, you know, an internship junior design letter? So Rachel, let's pause on you for a second. I love that you all are working together as mother and daughter, but what is your role with designed by us and how did you get involved? Sure, my role is as uh the man I managed the audio and sound programs at designed by us. Um, I got involved because my mother and I did see that like I am a designer by trade, I create my own music. I designed my own music and I perform my own music and I just saw places in the music industry that everyone could learn from through my experience as a teenager performing in new york city. And I also want to point out that your mother is also a designer who's associated with what she wasn't able to be here today. We're going to have a moment with three generations, which I think she's working. She's, she's actually, she's actually designing today. My mom is gonna kill me, you're not here. So, Um, but she is in her 70s, we have three generations designed, she is um, she ran a 30-year architecture and design studio in which I grew up in. And so you know, so many people say, how did you stumble into this? I actually did everything as a teenager, not trying to be like your mom and then you end up exactly like your mom sounds familiar. I was trying to not be like her because she's such an inspiration. I was just trying to be me and it so happened. I became a designer through that. I love that. No. And you both share passed around sound design and I love that you're able to find both of your paths intersect here at design core. So you mentioned the masks, I want you guys to show, I think you I want you to talk a little bit about how design core is actually being put into action. You're making things, things are really happening, this isn't just, you know, theoretically learning it so by doing so. Absolutely. So first of all, if you go to designed by us dot org, if you are a designer or you are looking to Menti people, um what we do is actually, we have a great pipeline of really senior design talent that comes in and volunteers to mentor others. Um One of the core design briefs that we launched during the pandemic was called the million mask May Day. Um and it began out of the need for uh personal protective equipment for those of you that lived in new york. I'm sure if you knew for a very long time it was really tough for us to get proper PPE. Um and so we went about actually Going through the process of understanding what it took to create a 95 mask And we kind of deconstructed the N- 95 masks to reconstructed in um new kinds of materials. So as a part of the initiative, we actually created virtual studios across the country, we funded virtual studios across the country um taught three D industrial design, um did research as a part of it actually taught research because part of being in the design core and being an apprentice in that design core is actually learning through making. So we put out a grand challenge that said, can we get to 100 million masks worldwide? Um And the answer from the design core was yes, we can. Yes we can. Um and but it was really important to think about the design brief of having constraints, right? One of the things the constraint needed, the one it needed to provide the appropriate amount of protection, the second part needed to be sustainable reusable because one of the large challenges that it was a very young apprentice from a refugee camp uh that we will touch on. That told us one of the largest problems that was happening was land pollution from single use PPE. So one of the things that we said, we have to make this, you know, if we create a constraint we can innovate around it. Um And the last part of it was it needed to scale and it needed to scale beyond um just here in the United States because while after a while we may have figured PPE out um the vast majority of the rest of the world in places like africa, Puerto rico. We actually recently just sent uh you know, thousands of mass to Puerto rico still don't have appropriate PPE long and short to get there Rachel. Uh working with me, I was kind of the lead researcher teaching uh three D. Scanning so that we could understand people's face dimensions. We get the size right because the proper mask isn't proper without a seal and the right filtration. Um we were able to put this into a design brief and worked across the country um set up three D. Print studios uh kinda fab labs, you know pop up fab labs and started producing math day in and day out. And it was a paid model. The important part of this right Rachel. It was it was an absolutely paid model. We want to make sure especially in a pandemic where people did not have access to the usual income, were able to get a fair wage. That was very important. Not just any wage but a fair wage for the work they were doing. And it was really interesting because it started with sowing sowing used to be a hobby of mine that I used to tailor my outfit for performances and it immediately overnight became an essential skill to survive in a pandemic. So when we couldn't figure out how to scale sewing because it does take a lot of time and effort in people, one of our apprentices actually brought up why not three D. Print them with this open source code that I have here that he was trying to use to equip his community. And when we started doing the research and development, It became a no brainer because they're durable, they can be put in the dishwasher, you can wash the merv 13 filter which allows 94% filtration. And then we were able to find filament for our three D printers, which was antimicrobial, which also made it medical grade, which means we could donate these to local hospitals to healthcare workers, to domestic workers who are going into homes. And it also allowed us to donate them to election workers because this was a time where elections were happening. I myself worked it and we were able to make face shields and masks to protect our election workers during a very important election. That's amazing. Um, you talked about working within constraints obviously in the past two years have provided wide range of constraints, one of them being remote and, and Rachel. So you've trained apprentice the world virtually in, in kenya brazil Argentina, can you talk a little bit about that program and how you went about that? Yeah, absolutely. Um, it's a lot of management on the time because you're dealing with a lot of different time zones. So it's also understanding about making sure that they have strong internet connections and create either if they don't have the infrastructure, creating an infrastructure bringing them sending them hotspots that allow them to talk to us. So then we're not just heads on a Youtube video that we've sent them and then we can spend and by doing zoom, which was a constraint, but also a huge asset during the pandemic allowed us to go one on one and help them with any issues that might arose and helped us learn how to adapt our curriculum. The girls in Kakuma taught us a ton. We actually partnered. One of the important parts of our apprentice program was understanding that apprentice programs have been along around for hundreds of years and there were organizations in communities that we knew that we could reach. But as opposed to coming in and kind of imposing ourselves on those organizations, we partnered with them. You know, we did public private partnerships in a manner that, you know, we invested in the girls in Kakuma through an organization called I am the code. Uh, we developed co developed the curriculum And then we were the mentors, right? We were kind of, it was a 24 x seven operation across the world. Um, and what was really exciting about that was uh, in refugee camps. And this was, I think one of the eye opening things for both of us was that young women were actually not getting PPE before men were uh, it was, you know, through the a serious cultural factor that, you know in most communities outside of the United States. Women are unequal yet they are still part of the workforce. Right? Um, and they were utilizing sanitary napkins as masks and so to be able to bring in one, uh, to be able to donate hundreds of three d printers, um, and all of the materials and then do the training remotely what exactly the action learning and kind of the prototype. We needed to be able to scale this program. Um, I want you to put your amazon hat back on, which you quote, which you're easy. You're part of your role. Now. I'm understanding why it's amazing that you're, you're, you've got both roles going on. It's a two part question. How is um, how are you deploying design apprenticeship at amazon and for the folks in the room that are thinking, okay, I would love to do design apprenticeship. I'd love to get something going like what are the bare bones? I think people feel overwhelmed. How do you start a new program? So let me start with, you know, with amazon has always been really great about apprenticeships and the whole, we had technology apprenticeship when we began and um, you know, I would say within the last three years we began piloting apprenticeship and the, the importance about uh, an apprentice that was certification at the end, right. Um, and going in and realizing that the certification can be in lieu of a college degree, right? We're offering different and new pathways into what it means to be Amazonian one and then two to be entry into design. And so we have deployed apprentices across the country. But one of the, I think one of the key learnings for us was actually going in and partnering with organizations like career wise new york is a great example of, I have apprentices on my Alexa design team today, uh that are working on new Alexis skills that are working on research uh for new products that are really getting immersed in the everyday workings both of our unique and Amazonian culture, but also the hard skills that you need there. So these are high schools, an opportunity to partner with with outside organizations who have been on the ground, right? And and who understand the communities that we're going into and recruiting from um and and identifying students in a way that we are able to attract the, a real diverse talent and then understand, you know, I think the early days of the partnership was understanding what skill sets already existed and where did we need to come in and augment So part of it is the recruitment, but then a part of it is also getting your existing workforce to volunteer to teach design and or research at that core curriculum level. Uh so that what you're doing is actually producing now, building that pipeline of certified UX researchers and designers. Amazing, Amazing. Um thank you both for everything you're doing on, on the front lines and and and doing things together, It's, it's really, really inspiring. So thank you for joining us today, thank you for having us, we're having a blast

Matthew Eby, Founder and Executive Director, First Street Foundation
In conversation with: Kristen Bellstrom, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Climate Risk At Your Fingertips 

with the effects of climate change increasingly evident. American homeowners can find it difficult to properly assess the risk to their properties and lives from wildfires and floods. The First Street Foundation with its team of client scientists, Computer modelers and researchers can help. Last week, this Brooklyn-based nonprofit released a wildfire risk model showing that almost 80 million us residences and buildings and commercial businesses Face some risk of wildfire damage over the next 30 years. Um, and it also comes on the back of their flood risk model, which showed that actually millions of homeowners are at risk from flooding is not actually disclosed by, disclosed by federal maps. Um, first reads founder who's going to join us in a moment, is going to help explain how they designed their sophisticated model and why they're making their predictive data available to everyone. So please join me in welcoming Matthew eby, founder and executive director of First Street Foundation in conversation with brainstorm design. Co chair christian nelson. Welcome Matthew, Thanks for having me. Um, so earlier today I was checking the news uh, and I saw that the National Oceanic and atmospheric administration has announced that it is expecting an above normal atlantic hurricane season this year. If that happens, this would be the seventh consecutive year. Uh, 2021 was a record year for wildfires. Uh, 7.7 million acres burned in the us. Uh, we're coming up on the 2022 season for, for both flooding and fires, I assume. Um, so I think, you know, these stats make it clear, uh, how important the mission of your organization is. So tell us a little bit about these tools that you're building. Yeah, absolutely. So we, at First Street Foundation originally started with flooding. Uh, and we start with flooding because it's the costliest natural disaster. So like you're saying the stats showing year on year, these things are going up into the right and from Canada. So we would say that the hockey stick, but unfortunately, the tools to turn these things, these physical climate risks into, uh, something that your average american can understand just don't exist. So the federal government produces flood rate maps that allow you to understand if you're in a flood zone or you're not in a flood zone, but they don't have anything to do with the property specific risk. They don't include certain elements like precipitation in their modeling. And most of all, they don't include climate change. So it's all a historical back looks. So what we've done is we've created not only the, uh, models, So working with over 80 climatologists, hydrologists, um, all the, as I say, uh, to produce the model, but then we've taken that and applied it to every home so that we can then turn it into statistics that your average american can understand. So we can tell you what's at risk for your property. How do you protect your property? And so the design behind that is really the, the UX and ui to turn these really complex topics into something that's really simple. Um and we have a slide that shows, I guess the difference between the fema models and your flood models and and that is because some of the things you were just talking about, like them not taking into account rainwater and things like that. Yeah, that's right. So when we first launched in june of 2021 of the maps that we produced was a comparison with the fema special flood hazard area. So we showed homes that were at risk from flooding, that 1% annualized risk. So that special flood hazard area and then what showed in our model for the same level of risk. And what we saw was there was about six million homes that had that level of risk that weren't in the special flood hazard areas from fema. Um now I think both of the tools, the flood tool and the fire tools also have future risk built in. Right. So my question about that, just from a design perspective is, you know, climate change is changing very quickly. It's happening more quickly than scientists have predicted. How do you look that far in the future with any degree of accuracy? Yeah. So there's ever evolving climate science as you're mentioning and we're getting smarter and smarter about these things and the global climate ensembles and the models that are leveraged for it. So what we do is we continuously upgrade our models with the latest science. So We look 30 years out, which in climate terms is not very long, but for us, you know, that's the term of the mortgage. So that's very important when you're thinking about buying and selling a home or renting a home and where you want to live. So we're able to update year on year with the latest science and in continuing to evolve in that nature. Um, but we're always able to give that shorter term window, which doesn't have too much about divergence in the emission. So when you look at emission scenarios over a 30 year period, most of the, what are called representative concentration pathways are very kind of similar. And then when you move further out to the kind of 2100 is where you see the big well, are we going to be on a one degree, two degree three degree four degree pathway. Um, so as you talked about with the flood tool, you had some data to start with, right, you were starting with the fema data or at least something to build on um, with the fire tool was that the case, are you starting completely from scratch And it's so like what kind of data sources are you, are you looking for that one? So with wildfire, the biggest source of data that you need off the hop is what are called fuels, which are things that burn, which is generally the forest. So there's something called the wildland urban interface, which is the wUI, it's a fun fun thing to say. Um and the WUI is where in the forest are the certain types of trees? How high are the trees? What's the condition of them? What's the type so that you can understand when there is a wildfire, How likely are they to to burn to combust? Uh So that data is available from the Forest Service, but there's not really a model out there that you're able to leverage. So we actually used wildfire software uh called Elm fire to then take all these different data sources like um the Forest Service um, dataset around the, the wildland urban interface. Use that with um previous known wildfire combustion sources and then use a 10 year time series from Noah, the same group that you're talking about at the beginning to then say, given all these weather patterns, given where wildfires can start and the conditions of the forest, how would they spread? And we did that 100 million times, um, to then have a, what's called a monte Carlo simulation to get two probabilities of things happening. Um, did you find anything with the fire map that surprised you or surprised other people? I mean, me personally, I'm not, there's a lot of climatologists on the team and experts on the team. I had no idea that florida had so much wildfire risk. And our, our chief data officers from florida, he said of course there is. Uh but there's not huge fires. You always think of the west coast when you think of fires and you think of large burning acres for days, weeks months of of long burning fires that were trying to put out and suppress. But within florida there's smaller fires that are very close to properties. So the number of properties that have that level of risk is actually very similar to California. But what we saw within the introduction of climate when we look at what's going to change within the forests and within the ignition points and those other elements that go into risk, we actually see that California has a six X increase in the homes that have that severe level of risk where texas and florida which have about the similar amount of risk today. Double so double is still bad but it's just not the same as six X. Yeah. Um I want to check in to see if we have any questions for Matthew yet. I have several more if not. Um Okay I don't oh yes sorry. Lights over their heart please. As a west coast person. I'm wondering about the six X stat. So where where do you find our places in the US that looks favorable when you look at these dimensions? Sure. So Rhode island is the place to be. Uh So uh Rhode island has what we use in our model, we use suppression which means people go out and put the fires out and uh fires that don't make it over 100 acres are aren't in our model. And Rhode island has zero fires that have made it over 100 acres because they're very small, close proximity to water and they have a great fire suppression team. So we actually show zero risk in Rhode island, which is kind of counterintuitive, there's obviously risk, but the way that we model risk, it doesn't show. So that actually in the east Coast, for the most part has a bunch of areas that are that are like that. Um can I ask the same question about flooding? Where, where are we safe from flooding? Flooding is a bit different because it rains everywhere and so you tend to have wrist, so when you're further away from the ocean, you tend to be in a better spot. But then that's not necessarily true for places like west Virginia that have a tremendous amount of precipitation risk. What's called alluvial risk or riverine risk, which is called alluvial risk. So flooding, there are some better places than other, but there's no, there's no Rhode island. Unfortunately Rhode island has a lot of blood red. Okay, we have another question over here. Yeah, I'm curious. I love this. Um and I love the premise that it will empower better consumer choice. Also think of the broader stakeholders and I'm curious how you think about it being utilized and even weaponized by other stakeholders, like say, insurers. So what we do is we try and democratize the data as we say. So we have great partnerships with realtor dot com or Redfin. So anyone who's kind of buying or selling real estate will find it when they go onto these portals or if you just go to risk factor dot com, type in your address, you get that information. Um, Insurance companies Tend to have a different view and a different model than us because they only care about 12 months. You sign up for a 12-month policy. They know what that risk will be for 12 months and then they address the premium the next 12 months just to compensate for that 12-month area. So they use a different model and a different technique to us. Uh, so our data actually doesn't inform insurance companies in the way that you might think. Um, but what it does do is it empowers consumers to understand what they can do about something. So there's a lot of people that have, for instance, homeowners insurance typically covers wildfire. But if you're on the west Coast, as we were just talking about some places are very severe risk. You actually getting a letter from your insurance company saying unfortunately we can't have wildfire, be part of your coverage, you'll have to get a separate policy and then that policy costs a lot. Uh, so what we're hoping to do is try and find solutions around what you can do for your property to minimize that risk. So then it'll actually be included in the pricing of your insurance where you can be certified. So they're great. There's a great nonprofit I BHP that's working on that exact thing. Um, I'm curious if you know beyond insurers, did you get any pushback from homeowners? Like I feel like this, this data not being available and then suddenly you're trying to sell your house and ah, here's a new level of transparency that perhaps you had not hoped for. We, we've had a lot of conversations internally about that, especially when we were very excited to land originally the partnership with Realtor dot com and now subsequently many other portals. Um, it's a difficult conversation because do you disclose this, which may impact someone today, but then the person who's buying that home doesn't understand the risk either. And then at what point does that happen where you distribute the data allow people to have this democratization of this type of data so that you have an informed country. And so we agreed internally that that was the right thing to do and to, to put this data out there, we have a full support team to answer questions. We aren't saying don't buy this home that's beside the ocean because we all want to live beside the ocean and vacation there and it's beautiful. Just know you should elevate your home have the right insurance to know what's going to happen over the next 30 years. I know that when you go to sell this home, someone's gonna be looking for the next period past that, which means your risk is not just your whole period, it's the next hold period for someone as well. Um, so tough ethical choices um, that we have to make. Um, but we believe that it's the right thing to do to give everyone this information and allow for uh, you know, a free flow of information. Yeah. It's unbelievable that some of this hasn't been available in the past. Um, I'm sure there are many risks to look at, but have you guys thought about what you might model next? Yeah, we just launched this other one. But yeah, no, it's okay. Uh, so wildfire just launched last monday. Uh, and we have our, our heat product, our heat factor coming on august 16th. So, uh, an interesting one there. If you take your hottest week generally in a year, the hottest seven days. What you'll see 30 years from now is that tends to be 30 days. So if you have seven really hot days right now this year that are in the city probably about 100 you're gonna end up with 30 of those, uh, in 30 years. So about a month. Uh, so not great news, but that'll be the next, um, foray that we have and then past that we're looking at Air quality, which includes smoke and things called particular matter 2.5 and ozone, uh, and wind and drought. So we have a bunch of models under development with the same kind of playbook that we run in the past. Okay, You guys have some work to do. Um, Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you for having me.

Ayse Birsel, Co-founder, Birsel + Seck; Author, Design the Life You Love 

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: Designing the (Long) Life You Love

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing the (Long) Life You Love


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: Designing the (Long) Life You Love


my talk is kind of like a bookend to john Maeda's talk yesterday. Did you listen to him and he was talking about how the things that people regret when they're dying? Well this is the other end of that where I'm going to talk about what you can or to design a long life so that you don't have regrets. So all right, are longer. Rita braver. Art is long life is short. But hold on 1/2. Art is long life is long, it's longer. You know, actually like that. And my daughter brought this home to me last year and when she burst into my room and she said, Mom, you have another 50 years to live. And I looked at her and I thought you know your math needs help. And then I realized I thought for a second and I realized it's true, I might have another 50 years to live and you know, you can trust your kids to tell you the truth as they see it. I was working on design the long life you love and I had never, I hadn't really put myself at the center of that and she did. So I'm going to do that for you now and say you're you're going to have a long life and what do you want to do with that life? Right. How are you going to use that extra time? That gift of time. So this 2030 years didn't exist before. You know if you think of your grandparents great grandparents, this is a new era were at the cusp of something big. This is as big in my mind as like the invention of moving pictures or automobiles or even space travel. And in fact these people who are now living really long, they're like long life astronauts going where no one has gone before. Right? So do you know any people like that long life astronauts? I see some heads nodding. So if you do you have these cards on the table, I'm going to ask you to note down one long life astronaut that comes to your mind in the moment, what's their name? Maybe knew a little emoji for them? And then right there qualities, What is it about them that inspires you? So this is my mom and she's my long life astronaut where she's going where few people have gone before. And my mom is, you know, she was always strong willed, but now she still has that strong will in Turkish. We say she's laughing in the face of her challenges and she uses her wit and humor and she adapts to challenges and situations. But you know, without losing or letting go of who she is. So she is my um, long life astronauts. So let's take a moment to note yours as you do that. Let me tell you a little bit more more about this exercise. Um, I developed design the life you love and wrote a book about it and this exercise that I'm sharing with you is at the heart of it. It's really about giving ordinary people and I call non designers, ordinary people with the, you know, with the biggest love for them um to teach them how to use design processes, tools to transform their lives. And these people are extraordinary. And this exercise come comes from um teaching people how to design their lives. And we used it with First Amazon to help older people 65 plus to design their life. And then with the scan foundation, we took it further where we went on the road from east to the west to the south of the United States, Urban, suburban and rural and asked 250 people to come and be a designer with us for a day. These were all people who were 65 all the way to 90 plus. And they joined us to co design their lives and you know, most aging research is very reductionist, You age and something breaks down. You know, it's either the family structure or your work structure or your financial structure or your social structure and it's very pessimistic and it's hard to design out of that um pessimism. But what we found co designing with older people, they don't see themselves as shrinking. They don't see their lives as shrinking. It's quite the opposite actually, its expansionist and they have this growth mindset and in a way they're great designers because they know how to turn challenges into opportunities just like we do and what we learned through this year long research, I can boil down to two words same difference. They basically told us if you want to understand what we want, think no further than what you want and what do we want? We all want love purpose, well being in friendship and they said so those are the things we want. It's the same but what's different is what we need to do to get to them. And so as designers, if we want to understand older people and what they need, we just need to think about what do we want and then mind the differences for insights and new ideas and solutions and these differences. I call them lessons that I've learned from older people and I wanted to share them with you today. So the first lesson of course I had to start with Love This lesson one is love is not only about loving others, it's also loving yourself. And I think this is the modern definition of love. It's accepting who you are. Self acceptance and compassion and empathy and this this is something that naturally happens as we age. But there is a lesson we can all learn earlier on, right. Um and then I interviewed Cindy gallop who's um ad exec I can hear somebody going, huh ad exec extraordinaire and he's the founder of make love not porn and she told me, I say I am the most proudly visible person of the most invisible segment of society, older women. And she told me lesson to live life on your own terms and don't give a damn what other people think. And Cindy then went on to tell me a bunch of dating advice which I've put in the book and it can make any 20 year old blush. So you have to, you have to check that out. Less than three is every breath is a new you. So this comes from Marshall Goldsmith who just wrote a book called The Earned Life and full disclosure, I am Marshall's coach. So he's designed and redesigned his life with me a couple of times and he said, you know there there is no permanent view, life is a constant restart. So every breath is a new you And a lot of the people that we designed and co designed with who were 65 and older, I mean even if they were 93, they were ready to redesign their lives. They didn't think that it's too late for them. So it is true. Every breath is a new use. So with that let's just take a deep breath will you? And when you release that, you're a new youth and then all of you here are high achievers. So I wanted to share this lesson with you. Um they told me happiness is not a function of achievement. We need to separate the two. So if you're in the game of I will be happy when you'll never win, right? So let's separate the two, but that doesn't mean that we can't Do what we love. So less than five do what makes you come alive and of all the lessons, this is the one that I want my kids to really um listen and hear and put into action and that's create time for what you love. Waste less time, share your knowledge and expertise with abundance with generosity and care less what people think again, what Cindy told me comes back And then less than six is about starting something new, even though you don't know how it will end. And my friend Michael Bengal Stayner just wrote a book about how to begin and he talks about the ambiguity of great projects and I think here you're all well well aware of that and you lean into that ambiguity of great project because there are no google maps of projects, right? And that's just the beauty of it. Because every project is a journey of discovery and that journey of discovery feeds our soul, which brings me to number lesson number seven, feeding our souls. So I have in fact have two teenagers and uh you know, living with them, I realize when we're young it's truly our body is over our minds, you know, they have hormones and mood swings and you know, growth spurts, But then as our logic start to kind of mature in our 20's And we move into like this our 30s and 50 our minds and our bodies balanced each other around And then in our 50s and 60s it's mind over body and in terms of the growth spurts when we're young it's the physical growth spurt and then we have an intellectual growth spurt and then we have a beautiful soul growth spurt and our souls grow and what grows our souls like nothing else friendship. Thank you. Um and love is found but friendships are made and if friendships are made we can have friendship factories and to have friendship factories you need warehouses of share time, shared spaces of production hubs of shared interests, trucks of reciprocal give and take all of that powered by turbines of trust. And if you're thinking and you just Spent two days in a friendship factory, you're right. I mean this fortunate conference, we've all been making friends, right? I've made many friends very fast in the space of two days. And these friendships I mean to keep so that's the nature of friendship, no matter our age, we can continue to make friends. And one of the key things in many speakers talked about Trust. The thing that feeds friendship trust is made through collaboration it and we are very good at this. It's about helping each other. That's reciprocity right? And older people are really knowledgeable about this, that's why our grandparents and uncles and aunts and mentors and teachers. They help us and they invest in us with their time and energy. And that Help actually helps them. So the lesson number nine, which is my final lesson is that helping you helps me most. Which brings me. If I were to take all of this, I would tell you, you know, the thrill is not gone. The thrill is on because first of all, I mean it's thrilling to be alive. Who doesn't want to live long, right? And these people are thrilled to be alive no matter what the challenges and then this will is on for us. All of us in this room. All our teams are companies as innovators, designers, business people. The thrill is on for us because this era didn't exist before. I mean, how lucky are we? I feel like we're people at the cusp of an incredible moment of innovation and we get to design products and businesses and services For this extra 2030 years. And so let's come back to our long life astronauts. This is my mom again, I drew her Picasso's style. Uh, if my mom who's very beautiful saw her drawing here that I was showing this drawing to. She would kill me. So don't tell her. But do tell me, I want to hear I want to have some volunteers who is your long life hero who would like to volunteer a long life astronaut. All right. Hi and Hi Girls again. Um so I actually picked two of my grandmother's um 173 and one passed away last year but made it to 98. And um when I think of kind of the characteristics, I love your statement of no, they know how to turn challenge into opportunities. So my family on my grandmother's side, we haven't had men make it past the age of 56. Yeah. And so that means they saw their husband passed, their grandchildren passed etcetera. And yet they were able to continue on through the idea of strength and they were very nurturing of everyone. Uh and also there was a lot of creativity in what they did and so they inspire me every day and I always say when people say who inspires, you I'm like my grandmother and I hope to just be like 10% of what they were even though they weren't on any magazine covers and usually they're the ones that you never hear about. But there's a reason why a lot of us are in these rooms today. Beautiful, thank you so much. Alright, one More Please. Oh great. Hi Angela Harris. Catapult design. Uh So my hero is my grandmother also um grandma Helen. So Shia she didn't sweat the small stuff. You know she really she said don't sweat the small stuff like really had this ability to prioritize and have this very easygoing air about it all like and just share that. Um She as she got older, I noticed that she became more irreverent, Her tolerance for authority. Um, grew very thin to the point where she, she at the very end even denounced her Catholicism, which nobody could believe. Um, she had an incredible sense of humor and I think it got better and better as she got older. Um, I think in the 40s, you know, kind of maybe in the 50s like sense of humor can kind of get lost And she got funnier. She got older so she died when she was 94. Um, her priorities like, so reading, I'm 5 to 7 books a week, crossword puzzle master, uh, swimming anywhere in anything cold rivers and lakes preferred a lifetime of musical ability acquired and shared from choirs to piano and, and many other instruments and really saying things that you know, were hard to hear. Like she would tell my mother like those pants don't look good on you and, and they didn't look good on her, you know, and my mom was not thrilled about that or she would come at me, you know, when I quit teaching, which she thought was the most brilliant. Um, you know, the most brilliant thing to do in the world, you know, and who knows? So yeah grandma Helen, wow, it's like we had have your grandma in the room, thank you so much Angela. Well I'm going to turn your here, I'll start with you. Um, Angela back to you and say um your grandma is continuing in you. I just met you but I can bet you don't uh sweat the small stuff and that you're easygoing your reverence, low tolerance for you know, any authority. I have to read my uh my own writing and then being able to say hard things and um saying hard things to hear. But I'm sure with a lot of kindness. So that's you. And then um let's see, continuing with grandmothers, Antoinette, uh you have the same nurturing creativity and the kind of this resilience in the face of challenges uh and hardship, but you're also creating a beautiful next generation. So that's you. And this is my way of saying, this is my way of saying that what we see in these people, long life astronauts that we admire our our own values. This is really my way of asking you what do you use values when it comes to long life And you know, our values are the foundation of our design, whether we design a life or a product or a service or a business, right? Um so I just wanted to connect you with your long life value and this is an exercise that I designed to help build empathy and bridge the gap between one person's life and another person's life. And um Antoinette I'm going to work humility into that as well as my next step. Um and I hope that you you can feel that empathy. Um When we were working with amazon we had a room full of 350 young designers and engineers in their twenties and thirties. And we did this exercise with them to help them have empathy for themselves, their future selves and their end users In the space of 10 minutes you can see it's very efficient And that prepared them to design uh for people who were 65 and older. Alright mom see you um you are the users of your life and you have a long life. Give yourself permission to design that long life. And then you also have end users for whom you can design a beautiful life. Nothing was designed for these people right? Because this time didn't exist before. So it's onto us to design a beautiful life for them and as we do it there's one thing we need to do and that is to co design with them. Co create with them, listening doesn't do it it leads to that pessimistic viewpoint you age and something breaks. But when you're designing with older people you realize life is thrilling. So um I didn't think that this was gonna be my second book but it was so compelling and I thought I'm going to write a book about long life and um it's coming out in december if you're interested. There's like a little Q. R. Code on those pages you can preorder it or gifted. Um And when I was writing this book initially I thought this is a book for older people. And then luckily I caught myself like 23 months into the writing process and I realized I said everything that you're talking about is telling you that these are lessons that we could all learn the sooner the better. And I realized this book is actually the oXo peeler of books. It's thank you for understanding what I mean. It's really um based on research into longer life and people who are older. But the results are for everyone and it's for all of us because after all we're saying different right same difference. Thank you.

Nina Bianchi, Solutions Principal, Public Sector, Medallia
Nina Walia, Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Senior Adviser, White House Presidential Innovation Fellows
In conversation with: Jason Mayden, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Redesigning Democracy 

the federal government could be viewed as the ultimate design client given the tremendous scope of his activities and the fact that it touches every member of our nation. But it also presents a myriad of challenges, negative perceptions from those who find it hard to access government services, clunky technology interfaces and unresponsive silo bureaucracies but changes on the way a presidential order is enlisting designers to transform the way government services are designed and delivered with the goal of rebuilding trust in government. We'll hear from two designers at the center of this undertaking who are helping to solve the ultimate design Shannon's challenge designing democracy. Two point Oh, please welcome to the stage. Nina bianchi Solutions Solutions, Principal public sector of Medallion and Nina WAlia entrepreneur residents and senior advisers to the White House presidential Innovation fellows. Thank you guys welcome welcome. Welcome selfishly. This is special for me because these are two of my heroes. So I've known them for so long, they're phenomenal. So I'm excited to dig in and get a sense of your background and have you both share your story. So Nina B and Nina W welcome to the stage, the powerful to Nina's exponentially needed to the, to the second power. Um, so I want to ask both of you briefly to share your backgrounds, the organizations you work for and then, you know, coming at this challenge from from two different directions, you know, tell us a little bit about that work and how you got started on it. Um, so I usually direct uh, teams and experiences for emerging technology and I've had the pleasure and privilege of doing so at companies like google Nike ge healthcare startups. But now I'm bringing all that experience and build expertise to the government where um I am a White House presidential innovation fellow um acting as a senior adviser and thought partner to federal leaders so that we can better design, build and deliver public services. Awesome. And Jason, thank you so much for having us here today. I'm thrilled to be here and we're closing this amazing event out at Medallion. The solution principal and we're elevating the human experience of government by putting people's voices at the center of everything and I will get into more detail what that means, my history, my short history. I recently served in the federal government as well. So I was Chief of People and Culture at the U. S. Food and Drug Administration. That tour of duty coincidentally coincide with the global pandemic. So it was a grand challenge, an honor to serve our nation at that time and previous to serving as the FDA, I was also a White House presidential Innovation fellow where I was initially deployed on then Vice President biden's cancer Moonshot to really bring the patient voice at the center of personalized medicine phenomenal in his real life superheroes. Can you both discuss how the mandate to deploy designed to help transform government comes directly from the top from biden and if so you know what does it mean with the executive order that was put out for C. X. And the X. Policy that are changing the way that democracy is being designed today. Yeah I'm trying to stay calm because these are things I get very excited about that. I I was thinking about bracken yesterday he answered a question and I think the question was where to get started in the design transformation and I think he said um but it starts with the Ceo and I was like that's so true. We have our nation's Ceo gets it. And so President biden put out this executive order for transforming customer experience and uh delivery of services, public service delivery. Not only that but then it's also really important pillar of the presidential management agenda. So what all this means is number one for the first time the government is going to have to account for the for public like the public experience with with getting benefits and interaction with government. That's huge like someone once said that's a big freaking deal. Um so stoked about that. It means assessing performance, publicly reporting the performance and continuously integrating customer feedback and all of this will be on performance dot gov. There's already some pre information there but you'll be able to follow along, I no longer work for the government so I can speak a bit more freely. This is a seriously huge deal. Um on the record this is monumental. It is truly transformative and I want to say former President Obama did start this transformation part of that was designing the White House presidential innovation program to bring all of these amazing people into government to help fuel this change. But what we're looking at now is a moon shot of the greatest order. And uh, we hear a lot of federal leaders speaking to this moon shot and it's all of agency, it's all of industry. So everyone out there, you are part of this too. And our job is to take this Moonshot rally around the moon shot and make it a moon landing. And that's what I'm most excited about because we know how to make this work, right? We know how to take the idea and put it into action. Yes. And just to add to that, you know, like it's coming at a time of of crisis where multiple crisis, climate covid and this is not just to recover from those, this is exciting because it's about overcoming this on a, on a sustainable basis. So what's fascinating is that both of you have had government experience, you've had corporate experience. Are there many designers and government right now working on this that you believe understand the problem and how to actually get after the solutions. Yes. Um, and that and that's that's part of, I think the work that we're also doing, I think, you know, do you want to speak to some of them? I think, I mean it requires all to learn new ways of working out so a lot of agencies are going through tremendous learning curves and learning journeys themselves. So I'm really excited right now last week I just had a call about it this morning helping federal leaders at the top of all agencies learn design thinking, learn what is an experienced mindset, what does it take to really think in a systemic way and what does it take to put people's voice at the center of their decision making. So I'm gonna shout out to the White House Leadership Development Program working with that program to lead amazing labs. Really great and also the C. X. Fellows. It's a lot of training learning coaching. So you said something I think that's very important you said putting people's voices at the center of government what was there before. So I'm not I'm not like government for the people by the people they wrote it down, imagine you're having a life event which requires you to navigate a web of government services and every you know, they all talk to in different ways. There's a phone, there's an email, there's a letter um that's the current reality, right? And part of this mandate is to actually look at these life events as a customer journey which is so exciting. So so you know, introducing this concept um as we look at major life events that that have major impacts on people's lives and um have a large volume coming in and saying, instead of having to go to each one of these doors, let's anticipate and understand your needs. And so right now um there is an effort to begin research on a few major life events like um turning 65 and retiring. I mean there's so much their Medicare, Social Security housing considerations facing a disaster um having a child and early childhood of low income families and a couple others. I'll add a little to that as well and it's true the voice of the people have always been there and these life events have always been there. However, we're starting to look at them with the power of design and technology and I think sometimes the government The voice of the people in the ye olde days with like quills and inks and but yet we live in 2022. So being able to leverage data, machine learning. So for example the veterans affairs bringing the voice of the people through data parsing insights, making it actionable. All the things we do as designers. Right, bringing that straight up to the secretary's office and say, hey this is what our people are saying, how are you going to make a decision about it? And then on a micro level, let's say in a veterans hospital, being able to look at feedback from patients say, hey I don't think our physicians are sitting down long enough with our patients at discharge, let's make a change there. So macro micro people's voices in the form of data. You just reminded me of a fun fact which is I was just thinking about like how would speed back coming like back in the day. Oh yeah Lincoln has like an open door policy at the white house and you could just walk in and you could talk to him and like that that was that was true. Direct feedback, the user experience. It's true. It's like hey I'm not really happy with the government. Can we talk about it? And the fact that you're able to track that with data and we laugh. But the reality is this is a monumental shift in how we've seen the governance of our country. You know evolved because now we're considering that each data point is a human being. It's a life that it should be considered, that should be discussed, that should be accounted for us, not just for a census. You know, it's for actual improvement of our well being. So it is phenomenal important work. And I think you know, need to be for you being on the outside. Now how are you helping dozens of agencies that are contracting with the government be prepared to take on this type of work, taking the best from customer employee experience from industry and bringing it into the government and I decided to leave the government take a break join Medallion and we are really working at scale and helping many agencies. U. S. D. A. CMS. V. A. Work through this in an iterative process. So it's human centered design process to bring the voice of the people to those who need it when they need it within the agencies. And that's critically important because that's where our resources and our taxes get deployed when we know what problems are actually relevant to our society. And so for you, Nina, w how do you actually do the goal setting and what are some of the current goals of the work that you're undertaking? You know, with this new initiative around design and experience. So how this all came to be, why we're even seeing this um, happen Or around two major goals. one is to rebuild trust in the government. And the second is to enact equity. Really speaking to a few words you said earlier and I'm just gonna dive into those a little. Um, I mean government should just work right, every interaction that we have with anyone, you know, but especially with the government is a chance. You know, whether you're um filing your taxes and waiting for your return, trying to renew your passport. That is a chance to show, hey, you can trust me. This is just going to work and rebuilding that trust and that face in democracy is such a big part of how design is being used here. So rebuilding trust. Um, the second part and this is where I know like you have to keep time because I can go off on this one. Um, because it's amazing is to enact equity because every interaction again that you have with everyone and with the government is a chance to serve and treat people with dignity and respect. And I mean we all know what administrative burden is. We like with the government like be real, it's there, but we don't all experience it equally. And the truth is there are um, traditionally underserved communities who face a disproportionate amount of administrative burden. I mean we're talking about, we're talking about time tech. I mean we all have the most of us have the privilege of working from home now. I'm thinking about like there are people providing what are essential services, They don't have that chance and they may even be working more than one job. Where is that time is that time to deal with that all of this burden. Um, there's, there's the learning of, you know, if if, if you, you've had the understanding of how to navigate a system, you don't have to take all that time to understand how it works. And then one thing that I've been thinking about because of the discussions that we've been having around, um, for trauma informed design. It's also just the psychological burden that also comes and and like Rachel said, you know, we all have different ones. So imagine, um, you know, you know as a brown person, you know if I'm being asked over and over by the government um what's your name and who are all the people in your household? Well I'm coming with some other stuff like why are you, why do you keep asking why you keep checking on me? So I was kind of getting excited. Well I was getting excited by everything George was saying but all of those things are listed in um we have an office of management and budget and they put out all these government words, a memory a memorandum which charges agencies when they are doing this work, they have to account for all of those burdens. So in a way George it's building a code of ethics. I was getting really excited thinking about that, building kind of ethics and accountability because that like it's written in there, you'll have to address these burdens cities, communities. I mean because we those of us who worked on mobile apps, we understand the impact of you know cognitive fatigue and decision fatigue. Right and how many choices you have to make, how many swipes, how many steps And if english isn't your first language or you have an impairment, it becomes even more detrimental to your experience. And so a lot of what you all are doing is being discussed on the podcast solving for X. Like that type of work I would love to know like what is the goal of this project and what are you hoping to you know um you know get people to pay attention to these discussions. Yes. So we are working on a podcast called solving for X. And I think the core of the question like what is X, what is the future of experience? What is the future of government experience? I hypothesize hypothesize it is work experience. So really looking at what it takes again to make this Moonshot into a moon landing and really develop healthy, robust equitable, fair compassionate society in which we all are receiving and connecting and serving one another better. Um there is this strange tendency I think of the government to separate everything and create silos and I'm learning this is also a thing in big companies um but bringing I. T and HR and operations together two truly prototype the future of work with better experiences. Yeah. And so one of the last questions I have is the government is clearly making investments in design. So what opportunities exist today that are unfilled that people may need to be made aware of or any initiatives that you would like to highlight for us to be able to participate in the work that you're doing with the fellowship? Yes, so many. Okay, um first I want to say um where the administration is making an investment in creating a front door to government. So imagine a world where you would, you can just go to this one place, the usa dot gov and that's where you could find out about all the your benefits you're eligible for, do do all the work you need to, without having to go to all these different doors um, and, and, and, and proactively kind of understand what you are, you are eligible for. Um, the, the other plug I'm going to give is um, two that you can all do is to establish support, um, do whatever you can to bring forth civic leave programs at where you are now, a lot of uh, some big tech companies already have these in place, but it gives a chance for really practice leaders to come in and contribute. And not only that, I promise you just from like my experience, they will, they will come back better leaders. They will, they will learn a version of leadership which is servant leadership where you were in service of others, not in charge of others that it is. I don't know if you can get anywhere else. Um, so there's that and then I also want to put a plug that we are solving. I mean if you want to talk about scale, There's No, No 1's skills like the government. So if y'all are interested in in solving them, some like really impactful problems. We are hiring designers, we have created the actual position of designers were in the, in the midst of doing that, the levels, the language because right now if you if you were to go on usa jobs and search you would not find the word design. It's not well understood. So that's something that we're really investing in establishing this career path. So we're hiring. Um, I want one more plug on the Civic Lead programs. There's there's right now applications are open for the program. I'm a part of which is the presidential Innovation fellow. So they're open till I think June 24 or so. Um, and this is that this is sort of senior senior leaders to come be thought partners. But we also have opportunities for um early or junior technologists, designers, data people in a newly established program called the U. S. Digital Core. And I just highly recommend taking advantage of these programs. Wonderful. So hopefully you got all those names. If not we'll make sure that the information is distributed. But thank you both for having us in conversation. Thank you. Thank you.

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