Name: Brainstorm Design 2023: Welcome
Uploaded: 2023-12-06
Duration: 7 min 5 s
Description: Clay Chandler, Executive Editor, Asia, FORTUNE; Chair, Brainstorm Design

Clay Chandler, Executive Editor, Asia, FORTUNE; Chair, Brainstorm Design

Brainstorm Design 2023: Welcome

Conferences

Good morning, everyone and welcome to the MGM Kow and to brainstorm design 2023. It's great to see you here in Macau. We're delighted to be in this city and we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. The significance of being in Macau. But first, I want to try to just share with you a design moment that comes from Silicon Valley. The year was 2021 and at the height of the pandemic, Uber ceo Dara Kosha Shahi was going stir crazy. He felt trapped in his San Francisco home trying to run the company's ride, hailing and food business remotely. He remembered later in an interview with fortune that he wanted to get the hell out of the house. He wanted to do something constructive. And so his solution to that dilemma was to try moonlighting as an Uber driver. First, he bought an E bike and he anonymously delivered food for the app in San Fran, San Francisco's busy streets. Then he expanded his experiment. He bought a used Tesla Model Y and began transporting riders around the city under the pseudonym Dave Kay. And what he discovered from that experience did not please him the more he drove, the more frustrated he became, it turns out that Uber's software was incredibly difficult for drivers to use. Uh As a company, Dara later explained, we were very much focused culturally on the rider and the eater product because we used it ourselves. But we didn't take pride in the driver product because none of us drove for Dara. That was a revelation. He called an All hands meeting for Uber staff where he delivered a stinging presentation with a now infamous title, Why We Suck? Well, that got a lot of attention. But Dara's epiphany that there is power and empathy, that understanding users can help your company suck. A little less is really at the heart of what brainstorm design is all about five years ago, fortune editors convened the first Brain Storm Design conference in Singapore because it had become clear to us that a large and growing number of fortune 500 companies were using the mindset and the methods of designers to better understand their customers, to hang on to those customers and to drive genuine business value. We thought that was a big deal and for at least two reasons, one is that we saw that the great forces of the modern age globalization and digitization were dismantling traditional barriers to entry in nearly every sector of the economy, large firms could no longer rely on manufacturing capacity, a superior supply chain, established distribution networks to defend their market positions from challengers. The rise of China and other emerging economies combined with newfangled technological developments like big data or the internet of things, automation and artificial intelligence were combining to flatten and commodity, traditional back end defenses. In this brave new world design offered a way for companies to focus on the front end of their operations where they actually connected with customers. A second reason was complexity. We thought that design could help bring order and coherence to the chaos of our increasingly hyper connected world. And it seemed to us that design had emerged as something more than just the middle management function. Design was no longer just about marketing and branding and packaging. More and more we saw that innovative firms were elevating designers to the C SUITE. They were think a design perspective as central to corporate structure, strategy and culture. And so we thought we should talk about that. We should bring people together. We organized a conference that convenes designers from a wide array of different experiences, classical designers, the people who make stuff, automobiles, appliances, buildings, whole cities, we convene the commercial designers. People who think a lot about processes, not so much just about how things look, but how they work. Think about companies like ide or mckinsey or Accenture or BCG. We convened digital designers who worry about user experience who create apps who help customers to navigate websites. And we tried to connect all those designers to business leaders, people who may not be design experts but who make key decisions involving resources, people, technology. This year, we're paying particular attention to how artificial intelligence is transforming the designer's role. Hence our theme for the year. Empathy in the age of A I. What does human centric design look like in an age when more and more decisions are being delegated to algorithms and robots, will A I help companies better understand or serve customers or will it create new barriers between them? We also hope to delve into other topics including how A I is shaking up the art market, design's role in the global race to dominate the electric vehicle market, designing immersive experiences and how design can help achieve social and humanitarian goals. It's fitting that we will engage in all these conversations here in Macau, a city with a long history as a global trade hub that is now in the midst of its own radical redesign. We hope that in some small way, these conversations will contribute to Macau's effort to re establish the city as a global center for art, culture, creativity and design. You'll likely by now have noticed the books outside that are on display around the room. These are titles that make up the Stanford Design Schools Designed Library. It's a 12 book publishing partnership between the D School and 10 Speed Press. If you would like to take a set of these books home, they'll be at the registration book. Please do take them they're there for you. Uh And we want to thank the D school for that. Um Today's program will be available in Mandarin translation which you can access by the headsets on the table on channel one. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that our, of our reporting and social media rules. What's set on stage is on the record, but what's set over the table during a meal or on a break is private unless agreed otherwise by the parties involved. We want to thank our host partner, Mgm Kai. We are delighted to be able to convene brainstorm design in this hotel, which is one of the most designed forward properties in Asia. And we're especially pleased to welcome MGM China's co-chair Pansy Ho as a speaker later today, we also wish to thank our strategic partner Wu Long Ye, our partner Cha Ling and our media partner at O Worldwide. I would like to acknowledge my brainstorm design colleagues as well. Alan Murray, who's Fortune Media's CEO. Thanks Alan for coming all this way to be here with us, Wang Fang, the Shanghai executive editor for Fortune China Nicholas Gordon, who's Asia editor for Fortune Claire Zillman, a senior editor for Fortune Chambers Brainstorm Design, co chair and founder and creative director of TC and friends. You get a chance to meet all those people as our program unfolds. And with that, I would like to welcome three of today's leading commercial designers to discuss with us here on stage the value of design. Please welcome Ben Sheer partner at mckinsey and Company Cliff Kwon UX designer and author of the outstanding book, user friendly, uh and Katrina Alcorn, former general manager for design at IBM. Folks wanted you to come out and join us, please.