MISC: Design by MISC

a journal of strategic insight and foresight VOL. 26 2017 $12 USD $15 CAD £7.50 GBP DISPLAY UNTIL 12/31/2017

Intelligent machines, volatile climates, and financial crises? Let’s do a better job of designing our futures for 2025. P.142

Is VR design inadvertently leaving out women? P. 30

Robots are the new stakeholders you want to be designing for. P. 22

Is design thinking still relevant? Let’s think design thinking one more time. P. 12

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Publisher

Cognizant Digital Business recognizes the coming convergence of new technologies – automation, the sensor-enabled world, AI, 3D printing, etc. – as well as the shifting demographics, expectations, and regulations that are creating a context for a new age of business. Cognizant Digital Business brings together digital strategy, deep industry knowledge, experience design, and technology expertise to help clients design, build, and run digital business solutions. The practice provides managed digital innovation at enterprise scale which includes services around Insight, Foresight, Strategy, Ideation, Experience Design, Prototyping, and a Foundry where pilot programs are moved to enterprise scale. cognizant.com

Theory, So What? 8

Publishing Advisory Council Scott Friedmann Dr. Andy Hines Will Novosedlik Lenore Richards Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius

Insight, So What? 10 I Design, Therefore I am 14 Robot-Centered Design 22 Designing the Future of Food 26 Ian Spalter: Insights From Instagram’s Head of Design 56 Service Design: Blueprints for Engagement 72 The Evolution of Design 112 From Disport to eSport 126 Designing our Futures in 2025 142 Experience 147

Head of Media & Publication Ashley Perez Karp Managing Editor Esther Rogers Lead Editor Mira Blumenthal Editor Taylor Dennis Additional Editing Dr. Paul Hartley Dominic Smith Guest Editor Will Novosedlik Art Director / Design Sali Tabacchi, Inc. Additional Design Jemuel Datiles Illustration Jennifer Backman Distribution (US/Canada) Disticor International Distribution Pineapple Media Subscription Enquiries subscription@miscmagazine.com Letters to the Editor letters@miscmagazine.com Contribution Enquiries contribution@miscmagazine.com Advertising Enquires advertising@miscmagazine.com Canada 241 Spadina Avenue, Suite 500 Toronto, ON M5T 2E2

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United States 649 Front Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94111 United Kingdom 85 Great Eastern Street London, EC2A 3HY United Kingdom Corporate Office Cognizant Digital Business 500 Frank W Burr Boulevard Teaneck, NJ 07666

ideacouture.com

Business. We help organizations navigate and innovate in complex and uncertain environments. We use design thinking methodologies to solve problems and exploit business opportunities – generating new growth, meaningful differentiation, and economic value. By taking an insight and foresight lens to our explorations in MISC, we can thoroughly examine the impacts and opportunities for change in a vast range of industries, allowing businesses to plan for the present and the future.

Some students enroll to become professional futurists, while others seek to bring a foresight perspective to their current careers. Students have three major areas of focus: understanding the future, mapping the future, and influencing the future, blending theory and practice to prepare graduates to make a difference in the world.

uh.edu

The University of Houston’s Foresight Program offers a Master’s Degree in Foresight, a four-course Graduate Certificate, and a week-long intensive bootcamp overview, each of which prepares students to work with businesses, governments, non-profits, and others to anticipate and prepare for the future. Established in 1974, it is the world’s longest-running degree program exclusively devoted to foresight.

kaospilot.dk

Kaospilot is an international school of entrepreneurship, creativity, and leadership. It was founded in 1991 as a response to the emerging need for a new type of education – one that could help young people navigate the changing reality of the late 20th century. The program’s main areas of focus are leadership, project management, creative business, and process design. Promoting a hands-on approach, case

studies are replaced by immersing students in real projects with real clients. Out of more than 600 graduates, one third have started their own company, NGO, or other similar initiative, the remaining hold management positions. Kaospilot also offers a wide range of courses for professionals in creative leadership and educational design.

cedim.edu.mx

Based in Monterrey, Mexico, CEDIM takes a design, innovation, and business comprehensive approach to education. Design is promoted as a core philosophy, and the faculty consists of active, young, and experienced professionals who have expertise in a broad range of fields. Students are engaged with real and dynamic work projects, and are encouraged

to immerse themselves in these active projects in order to participate in the realities of the workforce long before graduation. As a result, students at CEDIM develop an extensive sensitivity to their social, economic, and cultural environment, and go on to make real, pragmatic change in the world of design and innovation.

izational change, students in the program address the complex dilemmas of contemporary society. This interdisciplinary program interweaves design and foresight methods with social science, systemic design, and business, while providing the skills and knowledge to identify critical issues, frame problems, and develop innovative and humane solutions to better implementation plans.

ocadu.ca

OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program (SFI) can claim a place at the leading edge of pedagogy and foresight practice. The SFI program is creating a new kind of designer – a strategist who sees the world from a human perspective, rethinks what is possible, and imagines and plans a better future. Recognizing the increasing importance that design thinking can play in positively impacting society, enhancing business success, and managing organ-

Co-Publishers

Publisher / Editor-in-Chief Idris Mootee

Contributing Writers Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar Charles Andrew Tom Barker Lena Blackstock Dr. Eitan Buchalter Bill Buxton Nic Connolly Dave Derby Lee Fain Theo Forbath Dr. Andy Hines Rolando Hinojosa Cheryl Hsu Beth Johnson Stephanie Kaptein Mat Lincez Dr. Daniel Mai Tom Masterson Stephen Meyer Ginny Miller Jaraad Mootee Maryam Nabavi Rachel Noonan Maya Oczeretko Yadira Ornelas Marc Paulsen Dr. Scott Pobiner Paul Rowan Shane Saunderson Dr. Kate Sellen Dr. Maya Shapiro Valdis Silins Anne Stake Sarah Unger Udit Vira Dr. Matt Wilkinson Dr. Ted Witek

MISC (ISSN 1925-2129) is published by Cognizant Digital Business. All Rights Reserved 2017. Email misc@miscmagazine.com The advertising and articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publisher or editors. We are not to be held accountable for unsolicited manuscripts, artworks or photographs. All material within this magazine is © 2017 Cognizant Digital Business

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Contents

As co-publishers of MISC, our aim is to provide a new level of understanding in the fields of insight and foresight. We navigate the blurred boundaries of business, design, and innovation through in-depth articles from some of the preeminent voices of design thinking, technology, customer experience, and strategy. Idea Couture is a global strategic innovation and experience design firm. It is the innovation unit of Cognizant, and a member of Cognizant Digital

editorial excellence award-winning insight, foresight, and design

Special Message

2016 FO LIO: E D DIE A N D OZ ZIE A WA R D S EDI TO R I A L T E A M O F T H E Y E A R (W IN N ER) B-TO-B – FE AT U R E D ESIG N U N D ER 10 0,0 0 0 CIR C U L AT IO N FO R T H E FU T U R E AC C O R DIN G TO W O M EN (W IN N ER)

We are honored to receive the 2016 Folio: Eddie and Ozzie Award for Editorial Team of the Year. MISC continues to strive for excellence in journalism and design, pushing formal boundaries and providing a platform for innovation’s most thoughtful and provocative voices. In addition to being named Editorial Team of the Year, MISC has been recognized for the high-quality content and design of our features, The Future According to Women and The Collapse of the American Family Ideal.

Effective design begins with an understanding of human needs.

The MISC editorial team would like to send a heartfelt thank you to our contributors and readers. It’s you that we serve in our continuous pursuit of editorial excellence.

H O N O R A B LE M E N T IO N S B-T O- B – SIN G LE A R T IC LE IN

B-T O- B – SIN G LE A R T IC LE FO R

D ESIG N/A DV ER T ISI N G/M A R K IN G FO R

T H E C O LL A P S E O F T H E A M ER ICA N

T H E FU T U R E AC C O R DIN G TO W O M EN

FA MILY ID E A L

Designers have always worked at the intersection of market needs, cultural trends, and advanced technologies, be it digital or physical products, buildings and cities, and beyond. But today, these cultural and behavioral trends are being accelerated by advances in technology, some of which are so rapid that it has become difficult to integrate them into planning, design, and development before they are superseded. The planning cycles that we are accustomed to simply cannot catch up with the pace of technology’s progress. It is both a good thing and a bad thing. 30 years ago, the internet and smartphones were still new and no one was certain of their future impact. Today, over three billion people have a smartphone, and the fantasies of science fiction writers are becoming – or have already become – an astounding reality.

Today, we hold meetings via teleconferences; augmented and virtual reality are becoming mainstream; and machine learning and AI are managing hugely complex sets of data. We are transforming the potential for our living and working spaces, and even our minds. But the real lesson here is that, although it’s hard to keep up with technology’s speed, it is vital to know why we’re building something in the first place. And that’s where design comes in. Design is the understanding of human needs; it should come well before technology. But that is not always how things happen. Luckily, design can be retrofitted to find new applications for technology. Here, we hope to inspire you in some of the ways that design can make an impact on your products, business, and even how you live your life. Our editorial team and our expert contributors did an excellent job of producing this special design issue; I hope it gets you excited about how design, when married with insights gleaned from behavioral science, can shape our future in so many positive ways. Gajen Kandiah President / Cognizant Digital Business

Note from Publisher

Design First

I consider myself a designer first. Then a business strategist. Then a chief executive. But not every person is a designer, and not every designer can earn their living by designing. A designer’s job ranges from applying critical thinking and bringing an “anything is possible” attitude to blue sky ideas, to applying empathy in order to solve a well-defined human problem and to help refine and implement it successfully. Today, there is less of a differ-

ence between the “process schools” and “portfolio schools,” as the distinction between the two has now become irrelevant. Design has grown too big and has become too important, as it now touches so many areas of our industries and societies. Schools like Pratt Institute have moved toward the intersection of design, business, and social change, responding to the same movement happening at Stanford d.school. Many design schools

are adding or escalating abstract sensemaking, strategic thinking, formal human-centered design research methods, and even business design into their curriculums. But many design practitioners and educators have grown uncomfortable with the evolution of design. Design is becoming more entwined with strategy, and therefore many design decisions are looking more like strategic ones. Design is now used to solve certain wicked problems beyond new products or services. So what are design’s biggest challenges? With the “fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres,” as stated by German economist Klaus Schwab, AI is poised to dramatically change our world and the systems we’ve created. This comes with an opportunity to redesign systems beyond the current unsustainable industrial model; humans and machines will be co-designing this new world. We are now only years away from having AI-powered systems performing many of our everyday tasks more efficiently, more

productively, and more cost-effectively than people. How do we design our societies based on this new landscape of joblessness? How do we design and create entirely new kinds of occupations and millions of new jobs? After all, design is not just about creating mass-produced things or beautiful and exclusive handcrafted objects. It’s not just about stuff anymore. It’s about experiences. It’s about meanings. Design’s role is to reduce chaos to order, to understand intent and motivations. To design is to evoke feelings. To design is to make a statement. The answer to our problems must involve these questions: Why? For whom? When? And with what? This is design. In this special issue, our contributors cover a large range of topics around the impact that design has on our everyday lives and our futures. In “From Disport to eSport,” Valdis Silins explores the future of competitive gaming and how this can change the way we experience sports. In “Convergent Evolution,” Tom Masterson speaks to the impressive role that evolution has played

in designing living beings, and what we can learn from this. Rolando Hinojosa and Yadira Ornelas explore the quest for socially responsible transformation through design in Mexico City. And finally, we interview four leaders in service design in our special feature, “Blueprints for Engagement: How Service Design Can Elevate Consumer and Employee Experience.” We have come a long way in understanding the role that design

plays in our lives, but there’s a long road ahead. I hope we inspire you to think of new ways that design can change your present and future. Please enjoy this issue.

Idris Mootee Publisher / Editor-in-Chief Global CEO / Idea Couture

9 In this regular feature, we pick a social theory, explain its relevance to everyday life, and then explore how the theory’s implications could impact the future of your business, industry, or category.

Theory, so what?

The Bias of Digital Transformation Exploring the Link Between Digital Transformation and the Experience of Work

B Y D R. E M M A A I K E N - K L A R

Once there was an English word whose meaning had to do with fingers and toes. Over time, that word evolved to mean something quite different; abstracted away

from the human body, “digital” was transformed into a way of talking about data in the form of numerical “digits.” Rivaling fingers and toes for ubiquity, this new kind of “digital” has been transforming industrial futures and the

human experiences that live within them. Digital transformation refers to the ways that digital technologies enable the metamorphosis of an enterprise. Digital transformation introduces new ways of interacting with customers, organizing operational processes, and imagining business models. Beyond the blurring of traditionally discrete business functions, digital transformation means that technologies like AI, machine learning, and robotics will also forge new patterns and practices of work. In the enterprise context, underpinning all of these changes are the experiences, needs, and behaviors of those who support the day-to-day operations of a business. What will these changes mean for workers? How does digital transformation intersect with the sociality of work and employee engagement? What new forms of social organization will emerge, and how will they impact the future of business?

PHOTO: SPLITSHIRE

Harold Innis and the Bias of Communication Harold Adams Innis was a Canadian economic historian who looked to history to make sense of how the rise and fall of powerful empires was related to innovations in communication technologies. Empires they are not, but in today’s context, corporate enterprises (and the social organization of the workforces that support them) are a dominant social, political, and economic form. What questions emerge when we apply Innis’s theories of technological change to how we imagine the future of the enterprise in a world of digital transformation? The Bias of Communication was Innis’s analysis of the rise and fall of human civilizations based on the dominant forms of technology that characterized them. It is critical to note that Innis was not a technological determinist; he did not simply argue that technology impacts and transforms human culture and society. Instead, he was interested in the dialectical relationship between technology, human culture, and society; the ways that human sociality influenced the development of particular technologies; and how these technologies went on to shape and organize society and human sociality. In particular, Innis was interested in the abilities of empires (Egyptian, Babylonian, etc.) to extend themselves through time and over vast geographical spaces. He also examined how these abilities were supported by specific technologies and administrative practices. He argued that in each era, the institutional power structures of society were distinguished by a dominant form of technology that mediated information into systems of knowledge. Beginning with oral culture and through to the days of early writing, print technologies, and electronic media, Innis traced the intersections between communication technologies and the social institutions they supported. For Innis, the Bias of Communication referred to how technologies embedded different ways of structuring power; every medium had a specific bias toward either durability through time or mobility through space. Time-biased technologies, such as stone or clay, are difficult to transport, but their durability ensures the extension of power through time. Time-biased technologies support hierarchical power structures, including religious theocracies and monastic dynasties. These types of social organizations tend to emphasize community and tradition. Space-biased technologies, such as paper, radio, and television, are light and mobile, but they are not particularly durable. Space-biased technologies support the territorial expansion of power structures across geographical space. Innis argued that space-biased media lead to flatter forms of social organization, but also involve a loss of sense of community and place. He believed that any social organization is stable when there is balance between space- and time-biased media. However, when a society favors one bias over another, disruption occurs, because people at the margins begin to challenge the consolidation of power at the center. Through numerous historical examples, Innis showed that empires are most vulnerable when they are at their most powerful.

So What: Applying Space and Time Biases to the Human Experience of Digital Transformation Today, it’s the enterprise – not the empire – that’s being disrupted by technological innovation, and it’s here that the bias of communication takes on new relevance. Digital transformation is like Innis’s space bias on steroids: Administration is expanded over vast distances, and the organization becomes a liquid form that seeps through multiple channels, connecting and intersecting entities across vast geographical space and blurring the boundaries between traditionally distinct parts of a business. The Bias of Communication suggests that inherent to transformation of this scale is an imbalance that can disrupt the sociality of an enterprise. In this sense, Innis’s thinking raises interesting considerations for the ways that digital transformation intersects with the employee experience. How might a strategic focus on employee experience design create a balance to stabilize, and even power up, your digital transformation? /

If, as Innis argued, communication technologies can take down an empire, how are you future proofing the organizational culture that underpins your digital transformation?

Your digital transformation strategy may be customercentric, but how does it align with the needs and behaviors of your workforce – which is the heart and soul of your organization?

If digital transformation brings about social change, how has your HR team been empowered to help shape and guide your organization’s transition?

What sorts of “unofficial” processes, channels, practices, or communities are emerging on the margins of your business, and how might they signal a lack of empowerment or engagement in your workforce?

How does your organization define employee engagement, and how does this definition resonate with the lived experience of those working through digital transformation?

What would it mean for your organization to leverage time-biased tools, like storytelling, organizational creation myths, brand heritage, and institutional memories, as a means for engaging your employees? ////

Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar is VP, human insights at Idea Couture.

11 In every issue, we explore a topic through an anthropological lens in order to better understand its impacts on a wide range of industries.

Insight, so what?

There Is Always a Ritual The most profound way that people contextualize all aspects of their selfinjection and bring this process into their lives is by building a ritual for injecting. This ritual can take days or seconds, and it can have any number of steps. Despite the variation in people’s rituals, the act of ritual itself is an important way that patients contextualize the meaning of everything they are doing when they self-inject. This makes it easier for them to manage their fear and incorporate the alien action of self-injection into their lives. The ritual provides structure and allows them to turn complicated actions into habits. It does this by allowing them to systematically make difficult actions simpler through repetition. This repetition also provides a context for these actions that helps patients think about other things and avoid obsessing about the injection. However, these rituals are not taught by healthcare practitioners; they are the product of trial and error, which can result in mistakes becoming permanent habits.

The Role of the Ritual

Implications / Rituals can be healthy or unhealthy developments. / Failure is a major component in the development of an injection ritual.

In this edition of “Insight, so what?,” we explore the purpose of an insight and the role it plays in opening us up to an entirely new way of looking at something that is considered to be a known fact. When we build insights, we are trying to elevate something that has been observed during anthropological fieldwork into something that has profound meaning for the design process and allows us to identify problems that can be addressed as we build a product or service. This is not always easy, because people are often looking for an “aha moment” that feels revolutionary or transformative. However, some of the most important in-field discoveries

are actually far subtler; they are realizations that the people we study see very mundane things in slightly different ways than we do. In these instances, the role of the insight is not to highlight and observe a single issue or to identify an unmet need, but rather to allow the reader to see something that they already know in a completely different way. The insight I have selected is a good example of this. It came from a project in which my team and I examined the experience of self-injecting medication. We went into the field and spoke with a large number of individuals who had to use hypodermic needles or injection pens (self-contained automatic injection devices that deliver a subcutaneous injection with the push of a single button)

to take their medication without the assistance of a nurse or doctor. The purpose of the project was to try to make this experience better. What we found was that patients have a very different experience than their doctors and nurses think they do. We also found that there were some commonalities in the way people approached their injections, underlying what seemed to be idiosyncratic approaches. These commonalities became the key to articulating a set of insights that provide context for the entire act of self-injecting, rather than focusing on a particular need or problem to solve. These contextual insights provided a basis for the insights and observations that guided our ideation and design. Here, I present the most important one.

/ A ritual must be respected, because it is a carefully organized mechanism for managing oneself and one’s emotional wellbeing. / Most healthcare practitioners do not teach ritual in any meaningful way, and, as a result, patients’ rituals are not respected or supported by the healthcare system.

PHOTO: POZO PÉREZ

B Y D R. PA U L H A R T L E Y

This insight is something that is true despite a great deal of variation. Because it is not the product of a single observation, its implications are deeper than just uncovering a need or alerting the reader to something interesting. It speaks about something structural that is universal. Because of this, it has the power to substantially change our thinking.

Understanding how humans build rituals of all kinds can profoundly change the design process. Rituals have a basic structure, and we can look to ethnographic literature for any number of examples. Following Arnold van Gennep’s work on rites of passage and Victor Turner’s work The Ritual Process, we know that rituals have a basic structure. There are roughly three major phases: the entry, the liminal phase, and the exit phase. The purpose of a ritual of any kind is to develop a liminal state, a new conceptual space that is outside of real life. In such a space, society’s rules are different. People speak a different way, we act differently, and we are able to do things that might be against the rules of our daily lives. For good examples, think about how people act on a Friday night at a club, during a carnival, or at weddings. Much of that behavior would be completely out of place when the sun is out. The entry and exit phases are transitional phases that help people both move away from real life and get back into it. We put on different clothes; we pump ourselves up. We even add stimulants like drugs or alcohol to change our conceptual state. The process is entirely devoted to behaving in a different way and socializing differently. When it comes to ritual and self-injection, the difference between the liminal phase and real life is what allows us to do things like inject a metal needle into our bodies. Patients’ rituals are organized so that they can do something they otherwise would not do. This also means that we have to pay close attention to what patients do to get themselves into this liminal phase. Any designed intervention into this ritual – be it a service or a new injection device – is actually a forced adjustment to existing rituals. Additionally, clinical training is actually ritual training. Nurses who help people learn to use selfinjection devices are actually laying the foundation for an injection ritual. This means that if we make changes to the training or design a new service to help people eliminate something like site pain or improper injection technique, we are actually designing rituals.

The practical implications of this are easy to understand. As service designers, we have to make sure that whatever we build to help is part of building a good ritual. Any self-injection service has to help people with their entry phase; it has to make sense in the liminal state; and it has to help people return to their daily realities. Understanding that the ritual is the most important factor for understanding the successes and failures of the moment of injection helps us design with new information. Without an insight like this, we would be unaware that we are not designing an experience; we are designing for three discrete phases of a ritual process. Each of these parts already has a logic that we all understand and use. The ritual process provides a guide for organization behavior. No ritual can be redesigned without serious thought and attention. This insight brings in a wider world of human behavior that will make the design process easier by focusing a designer’s attention onto a framework that they already know. With this information in mind, the entire design process can take a new direction and align itself with something that makes us all the more human. //// Dr. Paul Hartley is executive director and cofounder, Institute for Human Futures and a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

// Understanding how humans build rituals of all kinds can profoundly change the design process. //

structure. Today’s management concepts are heavily based on the ideas of optimization and scale economics, meaning that organizations are focusing on making better use of their resources and on exercising their market power to gain a competitive advantage. This approach does not really address the other side of the problem, which has to do with size. Large organizations experience their own set of problems, such as when legacies and bureaucracy hinder imagination and opportunities for growth. Over the last century, we saw the perfection of the bureaucracy – a form of organization that has been enormously successful and is the result of hundreds of years of evolution. German sociologist and political economist Max Weber is best known for his work on the “Protestant ethic,” relating Protestantism to capitalism, and for his ideas on bureaucracy, the key characteristics of which are outlined below. Today, many of these principles are common practice. However, organizations did not always have these features; they are all human inventions. / Specification of jobs with detailed rights, obligations, responsibilities, and scopes of authority (i.e. the M-form organization). / Systems of supervision and subordination. BY IDRIS MOOTEE

/ Unity of command (for efficiency). / Extensive use of written documents.

This is an updated version of an article I wrote in 2007 while waiting for a flight. I think it is time to revisit and update this article, as “design thinking” is in a very different state today than it was 10 years ago, with organizations practicing it to different degrees of maturity. Before my book Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation was published in 2013, I was often asked, “What does design thinking have to do with business strategy? Does it mean teaching business people to design or to appreciate design, or does it simply mean promoting white-collar creativity?” It is neither. When talking about design thinking, most people are referring to aesthetics (mainly highly stylistic design or usability), and they generally cannot relate design thinking to strategy (which, for many, means only spreadsheets and PowerPoint). As I’ve always explained, design thinking is crucial to any innovation effort if a company wants to break out of its current competitive

/ Application of consistent and complete rules (i.e. a company manual). / Work assigned and personnel hired based on competence and experience. The idea behind these principles is that hierarchical authority is required in bureaucracies so that highly trained experts can be properly used as managers. For example, it does little good to train someone as a software engineer to then have that employee receive orders from an accountant. As Weber argued, rational bureaucracies can only be operated if the managers deployed at each level have been selected and trained for their specific jobs. Bureaucracy often holds large companies back from being innovative. Do you see what’s wrong with this? Most think bureaucracy is part of what we consider “management.” However, management was originally designed to meet very different needs, like managing repetitive tasks,

improving economic efficiency, and increasing labor productivity. Today, organizational management needs are vastly different, as they are centered on speed and multidisciplinary collaboration. This is where design thinking can play a major role. Let’s revisit the list with design thinking in mind: / Specification of jobs. The need for multidisciplinary thinking forces us to rethink how we help employees develop multiple competencies rather than one specialty. By using a multidisciplinary approach to management, we can remove boundaries, redefine problems, and reach solutions based on a more well-rounded understanding of complex situations. / System of supervision and subordination. In today’s knowledge-based economy, the level of supervision is being minimized. The challenge now is learning how to empower employees, not to supervise them. / Unity of command. Today’s organizations are moving beyond the matrix structure to become task and project based. The idea that each employee is accountable to only one supervisor – who in turn is accountable to only one supervisor, and so on – is becoming irrelevant. / Extensive use of written documents. Millennials are used to instant, on-demand learning. With this generation less likely to go through massive paper documents, many of the texts companies produce end up going unread. / Application of consistent and complete rules. Although companies want their managers to stick to the rules, when they ask them to think outside the box, they are also forcing them to break those rules. When innovation is the goal, the company manual becomes useless. / Assign work and hire personnel based on competence and experience. This makes sense and is still relevant to some degree. Today, there is an emphasis being placed on employees’ ability to learn and unlearn, as it is not always possible to hire people with the experience required to handle something that has not been done (as is the case with most innovation projects).

For Weber, the goal of a bureaucratic organization was to suppress the human in order to ensure a strict set of rules was followed; in another words, bureaucracy helps keep things predictable. In this way, bureaucracy was the natural descendent of social engineering that emerged when large modern organizations were developed. Many companies have risen to the top of their industries by adopting bureaucratic processes to avoid any suffering caused by rapid growth. For companies to function and advance in today’s competitive and fast-moving business landscape, managers and strategists must not only be collaborative, but also empathetic. The key is to bring this empathetic mindset to explore a landscape of innovation that has everything to do with people, their needs, their lifestyles, their technologies, and how they make brand choices. It is in fact a process of applied imagination and creativity. The bigger question is this: How do companies apply design thinking to inspire exploratory processes in corporate strategy development? Many companies fail in their attempts to innovate because they lack the balance between business discipline and imagination. One last time: Design thinking is not about design. //// Idris Mootee is global CEO and cofounder of Idea Couture.

// Design thinking is crucial to any innovation effort if a company wants to break out of its current competitive structure. //

I Design, Therefore I Am

BY WILL NOVOSEDLIK

As a university freshman, I studied philosophy. One of the first thinkers we studied was Aristotle, and for one of the first assignments we had was to answer the question, “Was Aristotle right in saying that the only thing that separates humans from animals is our ability to reason?” Of course, the question was designed to test a first-year philosophy student’s own power of reason, and my answer was that reason was not the only difference to consider. The example I provided was crime: No animal can be accused of committing a crime, and since crime is not as much the product of reason as it is of emotion, reason is therefore not the only difference between homo sapiens and the rest of creation. I could also have said that there is another skill not bestowed upon animals, one that clearly marks human intelligence as the unique wonder that it is: the ability to design. René Descartes, in a nod to Aristotle, may have famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” But I would say, “I design, therefore I am.”

What does the word “design” mean? At a very high level, it can be seen as the ability to imagine something that isn’t here yet. Now, some may point out that you can say that about any art form. All great art – especially the kind that breaks new ground and challenges our accepted norms – is about creating something that the world has not yet seen. But what separates art from design is its purpose. Art is made with no other purpose but to communicate what is in the artist’s mind. What makes the art great is the quality and relevance of the artist’s ideas. Art is not a solution to a problem. But design is. Ultimately, the role of design is to solve a problem through the creation of a plan for the construction of an object, system, or human interaction. At a formal level, it is commonly associated with disciplines like architecture, urban planning, graphic design, UX design, industrial design, and service design. As such, it is seen as the domain of a small number of practitioners who are trained in or gifted with this ability to apply both a functional and aesthetic imagination to the inception, iteration, and refinement of artifacts of utility and beauty.

PHOTO: KAISCHING

(With Apologies to René Descartes)

There are plenty of examples of such artifacts throughout human history, many of them anonymously designed, many attributable to notable figures whose work constitutes the accepted canons of design history. But I would posit that everything that has not been directly produced by nature is the result of a human design decision, whether that human is conscious of the fact that she is designing or not. When you plan your day, you are making design decisions. When you make a grocery list, you are designing your nutrition. As I write this article, I am designing the message I wish to convey. Though we have been doing it since we were cavemen, the word “design” did not really achieve its current cultural significance until the end of the 19th century. As Czech philosopher, writer, and journalist Vilém Flusser reminds us, at that time, modern culture made a clear distinction between the arts and technology – the latter being scientific, quantifiable, and hard, the former being aesthetic, evaluative, and soft. Design became the bridge across this divide. In Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, Flusser states how, “…in contemporary life, design more or less indicates the site where

art and technology (along with their respective evaluative and scientific ways of thinking) come together as equals, making a new form of culture possible.” This is where things get interesting. While any technology is the result of design decisions, few technologists would call themselves designers, which is why so much technology is so poorly designed. Technology is just waking up to the importance of design principles. This is concurrent with the rise of human-centered design, a pattern of practice that sees all design as a response to a real human need rather than just an expression of what someone thinks is a cool idea. If design is a core human skill, an ability that defines us as different from all other sentient beings, then the human-centered conception of design is perhaps the most authentic manifestation of our species’ existence. I design, therefore I am human. //// Will Novosedlik is AVP, head of growth partnerships at Idea Couture.

creative is very unlikely to feel they are a competent designer. Again, we divide ourselves up into those (few) who are worthy of being labeled “designers,” leaving everyone else, by definition, as “non-designers.” In truth, there are two defining features of design: It is the act of doing or creating something purposeful where the solution is not already predetermined. As humans, we do this just about all the time. We are constantly doing things with a purpose and making things up as we go along. Seen this way, every conversation is an act of design (it has a purpose, but it has no script); so is every piece of work we do that requires thought, consideration, and decision-making. Every time we use our imagination, even if not thoughtfully, deliberately, or even consciously, we are conceiving something that is not simply a reflection of reality. Every act of imagination is a brief act of unfulfilled design. As Victor Papanek, the visionary designer and educator, wrote:

Reclaiming Design as a Tool for the Masses

BY CHARLES ANDREW

In his 2012 book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer points out that when a class of 7-year-old children is asked if they are creative, about 95% of them will answer, “yes.” Within 3 years, that proportion drops to 50%. By the time they are 14, it will have decreased to 5%. What’s happened here? Do only 1 in 20 children retain the ability to be creative, or do only 1 in 20 retain the belief that they have that ability? I strongly believe that it is the belief that is the problem, not the ability. This may be because “creativity” has been hijacked and appropriated by a small subset of self-identifying creative people who have a psychological and economic incentive to lay claim to a particular type of talent. These folks may indeed excel at creative thinking, but creativity runs along a spectrum of “quite creative” to “very creative.”

Indeed, imagination – the essential ingredient of creativity – is, as close as anything we can define, what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Imagination is not just another capability to add to the list of human virtues; it is the very essence of humanity, at both the individual and societal level. If you read the books of Yuval Noah Harari (as recommended by the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Gates), you will recall his thesis that the rise of our species can be attributed to our imagination and, specifically, our ability to conceive and believe in stories – both things that transcend objective reality. As Harari explains: The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mysterious glue that enables millions of humans to cooperate effectively. This mysterious glue is made of stories, not genes. We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money, and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, and no human rights – except in the common imagination of human beings. You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will get limitless bananas in chimpanzee heaven. Only Sapiens can believe such stories. This is why we rule the world, and chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. — “Power and Imagination” Yet rather than seeing imaginativeness and creativity as universal human traits, we are more likely to think of it in binary terms: “She is creative. I am not creative.” How does this relate to design? Without even needing to resolve the semantic question of the relative definitions and distinctions between creativity and design, the two are intimately connected. Creativity is an intrinsic component of design, and someone who does not self-identify as

All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple, choosing sides for a backlot baseball game, and educating a child. — Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1985) Why is this important, beyond just having a semantic debate over the meaning of a word? There are two reasons to reclaim design from the exclusive purview of designers. The first is that when people feel that they do not possess a certain ability, they naturally avoid applying it. This results in many thoughtless and

unnecessarily poor experiences in life. The second reason is connected to the first: When people do not believe in their own design abilities, they miss many opportunities to improve. If you believe you’re not a designer in the first place, then it’s not something you are going to try to improve on. An example of a design skill that is intuitive but would benefit hugely from more conscious and deliberate application is empathetic thinking – that is, simply thinking about the perspectives of those being “designed” for, whether those people are the readers of the email being crafted, the children whose homework habits are being encouraged, the spouse whose mood is being altered, or the foreign state being influenced. The single greatest habit of designers is imagining things from the outside in, taking the perspective of the user or recipient and placing themselves in the shoes (and minds) of the “other” while in the act of creation. This is, of course, a natural human ability – it is not exclusive or rare. As we evolved from our simian ancestors, empathy came hand-in-hand with our ability to stand upright. It was empathy that enabled us to cooperate successfully, and it was cooperation that underpinned the development of our societies and the benefits they brought. There is a neurological basis to this also; it is mirror neurons that give us the ability to imagine and identify with the subjective experiences of others. All of which is to say that empathy is not a rare biological or mental capability possessed only by accredited designers, but rather a skill possessed by all humans. It is a capability that is ours to use if we choose to. How much more successful and productive might we be if we recognized design for what it is and acknowledged that we are all, in fact, designers? The next time you have a problem to solve, stop for a second and act more like a designer. Who is this email, motivational plan, emotional reassurance, or foreign policy for, and what is their perspective? What is it like to be them? Now, go design. //// Charles Andrew is a senior client partner at Idea Couture.

DESIGNING MEANINGFUL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

A CHALLENGE FROM THE WORLD OF GENOMICS

PHOTO: HZV_WESTFALEN_DE

B Y D R. E I TA N B U C H A LT E R A N D D R. M AT T W I L K I N S O N

Imagine scientists researching and exploiting naturally occurring genetic variations in order to ensure food challenging, impossible even – but that is the mission that LGC’s genomics division has set for itself. In doing so, the division has grown rapidly, both organically and through acquisition, leaving it with a digital presence almost as complex as the challenges it aims to solve for its customers. Many companies will be familiar with the inevitability of a confusing digital landscape that so often follows a quick growth strategy. The implications range from multiple websites and a bewildering array of ordering processes, to messy customer interactions that involve a perplexing collection of brands. Within the world of genomics – where products are often highly technical and bespoke and clients are large, complex, and few in number – such digital challenges can be felt even more acutely. This complex digital presence was recognized as a barrier to growth, and so the company challenged Idea Couture to help deliver meaningful humancentered digital experiences.

This is incredibly important in the staggeringly complex world of genomics; the human genome alone contains approximately 3 billion base pairs that contain the code for the hundreds of thousands of genes that reside in the 23 chromosomes within the nucleus of each cell. Scientists are busy unlocking the secrets of how to use our understanding of the human genome to diagnose illness, develop better medicines, and enable physicians to select the most appropriate medicines for specific conditions. They don’t have time to navigate complicated web experiences or confusing order processes. Genomic analysis technologies are also being used to help increase agricultural production by accelerating the creation and delivery of new crop varieties and animal lineages to alleviate the challenge of feeding an ever-growing population. Markerassisted selection (MAS) and breeding programs allow farmers to select which seeds to plant or animals to breed to ensure that resources like fertile land, fertilizer, and water are used efficiently. Plants don’t stop growing on demand, and so gaining genomic data quickly is crucial if farmers only want to plant high-yielding crops.

An Evidence-Based Approach: Decoding Customers’ Challenges

Designing for Complexity, Uncertainty, and Scale

What We Learned

It’s critical to build a coherent understanding around the different ways customers experience their working lives. This idea may initially feel obscure and vague, and it may seem more foundational than actionable. However, it is only through understanding people’s holistic experiences that we can ever hope to design something that works within the parameters of what matters to them. The best way to understand what really matters to people is to speak to them. Within the context of striving to meet customers’ unarticulated needs, speaking with your clients is the principal way to understand the rich, messy nuances of their multi-layered experiences. It is through a deep engagement with customers’ experiences that we can begin the process of designing meaningful solutions, like a digital ecommerce platform. With this in mind, anthropological expertise becomes especially helpful, because it brings together academic rigor and cultural understanding in order to build a detailed picture of customers’ experiences. This is achieved through discussions with customers that strike a balance between natural and honest, while still remaining focused and insightful. It is crucial to engage customers in a semi-structured interview format in order to explore a brand’s specific area of interest (e.g. ordering habits, moments of tension, or access to dedicated expertise) while still allowing for natural conversation. In practice, this usually means asking people about their lives, listening carefully to how they make sense of the situations they experience, and then seamlessly steering conversation topics toward your key areas of focus. Ultimately, an anthropological approach enables companies to explore the ways in which individuals (and groups) experience the complex network of components that come together to form what we know as a “genomics working environment.”

Overwhelmingly, LGC customers live out their working lives in an environment that is engulfed with complexity, uncertainty, and phenomenal scale. As a result, these customers experience their working lives in ways that are fraught with difficulty, stress, and a fear of failure. Although genomics customers feel the pressures associated with such experiences, they have, on the whole, reluctantly come to know this world as a prickly norm that they have little influence over. They have, therefore, devised coping mechanisms (albeit convoluted ones) that lubricate some of the more unacceptable frictions in their days. In the genomics industry, customers often fear that they will be (or will be made to feel) responsible for some kind of failure in the system. Both their current pain points (e.g. ordering, forecasting, or the integration of systems) and their future struggles (e.g. climate, distribution, or a competitive landscape) involve this overarching distress. Whether they fail to supply orders on time, deliver a new diagnostic test, or something else entirely, the fear of failure exists as a potent force in their working lives. The presence of customer fear has given rise to one particularly powerful insight: customers’ orders are delicate packets of emotions. Customer orders often embody a significance far beyond the product’s actual utility. The stakes can be incredibly high – delays or errors can cause operations to cease, and careers, reputations, and vast sums of money can be on the line. Importantly, it requires hypothesized consequences that determine how emotionally connected (or not) a customer is to their order. In other words, orders are as important as the customer feels they are. Findings like these, which dig deep into the fundamental nature of customers’ ordering experiences, are of great significance when planning and executing the design of a digital platform. When equipped with customer-experience evidence around the fear of failure, for example, we become empowered to design digital ordering experiences (or anything else) in ways that truly connect with the deep and unarticulated needs of customers. It is precisely this kind of evidence-based approach that enables the design of truly meaningful customer experiences.

/ How do we incorporate an understanding of customers’ fear of failure into the experiences we design for them?

The upper hand stems from identifying the right questions. Questions like:

/ What can we do to ensure we always know the importance that customers ascribe to their orders? Genomics companies like LGC are faced with the challenge of curating experiences that are emotionally appropriate. Above all, it is through the identification of insight-led challenges that companies can innovate in ways that matter to people. Further, the rewards associated with knowing which questions to ask (and the cost of not knowing) are amplified in a genomics environment where there are fewer customers and larger accounts than in a typical B2C firm. This means that genomics customers’ interactions represent a much larger proportion of revenue than one would expect from a typical B2C transaction – so, designing it correctly is even more important. Asking the right questions is not easy, and it takes serious, dedicated commitment and corporate courage. But such a commitment is only the first step toward enacting an overall approach to business that truly places customers at its core. Following the identification of the right questions, a “customer core” corporate philosophy needs to inform design processes, systems, and technologies that are based on what we know to be true about customers’ experiences, behaviors, and unarticulated needs. Crucially, it is the holistic commitment to embracing evidence-based action that will ultimately unleash the full potential of this approach: designing meaningful customer experiences. //// Dr. Eitan Buchalter is a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. Dr. Matt Wilkinson is head of ecommerce for LGC’s genomics division.

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Robot-Centered Design

Know Your History Human-centered or user-centered design (UCD) is a process for creating a given product, service, or experience in which users’ values or characteristics are given close attention at each stage. Originally coined and crafted during the early days of software and user-interface development, HCD has now become a universal design and business framework for tackling problems with a constant consideration of the human perspective across all stages. The process is iterative, involves a variety of different skills and perspectives, and is driven by constant involvement of users throughout. HCD is often criticized for neglecting specific subgroups of people. Part of the challenge is that, since (most) designers are human, we often inject our own values and biases within our designs and lose sight of our intended user, particularly if their values and desires differ greatly from our own. Essentially, we’re so self-centered that sometimes we can’t see past ourselves when attempting to design for a specific user.

Know Your Future

The Future of User-Centered Design Has a New Kind of Stakeholder BY SHANE SAUNDERSON

You’re a designer. You create products, experiences, services, buildings, and more. Each time you begin the design process, you consider the multitude of touchpoints and features of your design and how they will engage with your intended user. This is the logic of the human-centered design (HCD) process: Keep people, their values, and their desires at the center of your approach. Start and end every action by thinking, “How would a human use my design?” Now you have a new group of stakeholders. Your experiences and buildings are becoming littered with them. Each time you begin the design process, asking what a human would want is no longer good enough. The HCD process is table stakes – if you haven’t already started thinking about how to create designs intended for multi-user scenarios, you’re designing to suit a past world. In the future of design, robots will be critical users to consider. The design process will no longer simply be a human-focused activity, but instead a complex, multi-stakeholder dance that must balance the values and constraints of man and machine. HCD will only be half the equation; the other half will be robot-centered design.

If we look to the future of robotic development, it’s fairly easy to envision a scenario where robots outnumber people (assuming they don’t already). With robots of all shapes and sizes wandering and engaging with the world around them, we should assume that this world will be different from today. Though we will design aspects of our robots to operate like humans, they will not be human; they will be something distinctly different. In some ways, they’ll be like us – we’ll likely anthropomorphize some robots by giving them a rough humanoid design – but in other ways, they will be nearly alien in nature. They’ll have cameras for eyes, microphones for ears, grippers for hands, wheels for feet, and a mind that – try as we may to design otherwise – diverges from the human brain rather than converging with it. They’ll search for tiny codes on walls, floors, and objects to help identify and orient the object and themselves. They’ll maneuver through ramps and lifts to get from A to B, avoiding battery-draining and labor-intensive staircases. They’ll cycle through a series of purpose-built manipulators to engage with the different doors, computer interfaces, and people they encounter. Think of some of what we consider more “simple” tasks and the difficulty in designing a system to fully accomplish those tasks. Completing a package delivery in an office breaks down into a series of steps that, while it may seem simple at first glance, becomes a bit more complicated when roboticized. First, the box must be grabbable by the robot. The pathway needs a steady ramp and elevators to pilot the whole way, or the system must be able to negotiate stairs. The walls

and floors need to be visually distinct to allow the system to model and navigate them. Any door handles or elevator buttons must be recognizable and easily manipulated by the robotic system. It must be able to see and avoid objects and know where to appropriately place the package. And finally, it must be capable of interacting with the intended recipient to ensure that they are happy with its actions and need no further help.

Should We Make Them Come to Us? The easy (though not very empathetic) answer is to make the robots play by our rules: have them interact and engage with a human world. And while this seems reasonable enough – we were here first, after all – it doesn’t do us roboticists much of a favor. Many of the problems currently plaguing modern roboticists are complex and nasty ones. However, through simple design tricks and adaptations – often ones that humans wouldn’t even notice – we can embed design features into the world around us to make life infinitely easier. If we instead choose to leave the world as is, we’re essentially telling roboticists that they need to replicate a perfect mechanical human – which, as you can imagine, is not an easy task. So instead of designing mechanical systems with crotch-height lubricant discharge valves, what kinds of adjustments should we be making for our robot buddies?

Floors and Walls In those hilarious moments where you’re looking at five different samples of grey carpet or paint that look identical, you may have wondered whether or not you were simply the center of a cruel joke, with selection between identical options being passed off as an important choice. To you, these subtle differences may mean nothing; however, to a robot, that Ashen Cloud grey might be impossible to differentiate from the Light Charcoal walls you’ve picked – and that’s just mean. You’d be amazed how quickly vision recognition systems could tell you their favorite Pantone colors.

Robotic Feng Shui

Standardized Grips

If we’ll go so far as to micro-adjust the layout of our household objects to improve the flow of energy, we could, at the very least, move the coffee table five centimeters to the left so that there’s a wide enough berth for the cleaning bot. Beyond simple clearance, how could the clever positioning of objects and features around us make life easier for both man and machine?

Looking at the world of product design, you would be hard-pressed to believe that a field called “human factors” exists when you consider the broad spectrum of grip and touch interactions we’re expected to complete. Fortunately for us, our hands are quite versatile. For robots, this is not the case. I’m not saying that I believe we can make one glove size for the whole world, but if we could at least reduce the spectrum to a non-infinite set of options, your robots would thank you dearly.

Mechanical Segregation Since the last thing that 99% of us want to do with a robot is hurt someone, the problem of world navigation becomes much more complex when you’re literally worried about stepping on someone’s toes. This means that robots have to move slowly and cautiously, and they must constantly be ready to stop and give way to unpredictable, scattered humans. Could the resulting loss in speed and efficiency provide sufficient justification to operate independent “robot lanes,” free of human interference?

Stairs Suck Take it from a guy who worked on this problem for a year: Climbing stairs sucks. Especially for robots.

Cheat Codes Until our vision and navigation systems are perfect, everyone can use a helping hand. And while we could continue to exclusively design city and building signs using those computationally difficult signs and symbols we like to call “letters” and “icons,” there is potential to convey much more information, more accurately and in less space, by leveraging barcodes, QR codes, and other machine-vision platforms. This approach simply takes one or two unnecessary steps out of the process of reading and ensures vastly improved comprehension.

Connected Everything On second thought, we can remove the need to physically interact with objects entirely if they all become connected and robots are given the ability to control them wirelessly. Done to the extreme, this does have the potential to create Skynet, giving all robots the perceived power of telekinesis – but it will be a ton easier to make a cup of coffee. The robots are coming. You, as a designer, have the ability to either slow or accelerate this new wave of technology. If we continue to march down the path of HCD, we will continue to create complicated worlds that ostracize and befuddle robots. Alternatively, if we adopt the principles of robot-centered design alongside HCD, we have the potential to start creating modern environments that enable and empower the future of human– machine collaboration. On the one hand, this is simply good design. If you know that the future of your designs is to have multiple key stakeholders, why would you ignore half of them? Any responsible designer should be considering any potential user of their design and how to optimize it for everyone. On the other hand, robot-centered design shows humanity at its most human. We have the opportunity to demonstrate that our empathy encompasses considerations even beyond our own species and can extend into our own creations. So, give a robot a helping hand – roboticists will thank you for making our lives easier, and we promise we’ll program our robots to thank you too. //// Shane Saunderson is VP, IC/ things at Idea Couture.

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Designing the Future of Food

An Interview with Denise Morrison, CEO of Campbell Soup Company

PHOTO: CHUTTERSNAP

B Y M AT L I N C E Z A N D M AYA O C Z E R E T K O

Navigating the immense transformation currently taking place in the food industry is certainly challenging, especially when you’re at the helm of an iconic company. From how we grow food to how we eat it, this complex world is being reshaped by technology and new consumer values. How will established food companies manage this transition? To future proof food, they must evolve to become human centric, design centric, future oriented, and technology fueled. Denise Morrison, President and CEO at Campbell Soup Company, is executing this strategy on all fronts. By reimagining how the company develops innovation and long-term strategic thinking and activating Campbell’s Purpose – “Real food that matters for life’s moments” – she is reshaping Campbell as the “biggest small food company” in the industry.

What challenges impact the food industry today? There are a lot of changes going on in the food industry, and I believe they all start with the consumer. When you step back, you can see there’s been a series of seismic shifts, the first one being a global economic realignment where we’ve had a burgeoning middle class in developing markets and a shrinking middle class in developed markets like the US. The second one is a massive demographic shift. The baby boomer generation, at 80 million strong, is a major cohort. But coming up behind them is the millennial generation, which is also close to 80 million strong, and behind them Generation Z. There has been a market shift with this demographic change, and if you look underneath it, you will also see a change in the composition of the American family. Families composed of a mom, dad, and two kids represent only around 24% of the population. Now there are other types of households, such as single adult households, multi-generational or multicultural ones, and households with same-sex parents or single mothers. Every one of these households or generations eats differently, shops differently, and thinks differently about food. There’s also a definite shift toward preferences for health and wellbeing – and this means different things to different people. This shift has had a profound impact on the food industry, particularly as it relates to consumers’ quests for more fresh, natural, organic, and functional foods. Finally, the digital shift is hitting like a tsunami. It is changing the way we engage and connect with consumers, and it’s also going to have a profound impact on commerce and the way we think about

In what ways is Campbell serving consumers’ desires for health and wellbeing? Our goal is to be the leading food company in that space. It starts with our purpose: “Real food that matters for life’s moments.” As you can imagine, we’ve had great debates about what “real food” is. We decided that it was necessary for us to put some definition around it – not only for ourselves, but also to make sure that we were validating it with consumers. So, we established our real food philosophy. Real food is food that we are proud to serve at our own tables. Real food has roots. It should be made with recognizable, desirable ingredients from plants or animals. Real food is prepared with care. Real food should be affordable and accessible to all people. Transparency is the single most important ingredient in the recipe for building consumer trust. And consumer trust is everything. A company and a brand needs to have a positive reputation. Without that, you have nothing. How is Campbell building consumer trust? There has been an absolute erosion of trust across established institutions, whether you look at governments, media, or food companies. For this reason, consumer trust has to be earned every day. We’re taking steps to do that. We are improving the ingredients in our food. This includes removing artificial colors or flavors, taking BPA out of our can liners, and using antibiotic-free chicken in our recipes. These are just a few of the many steps we have taken to provide real food that is affordable and accessible. We have also launched whatsinmyfood.com, where the consumer can click on each brand to learn what is in the food, how it’s grown, and where it comes from. We continue to enhance this information to give consumers that knowledge about their food. We believe that this transparency is really imperative to building consumer trust. How do you design transparency into the way your products are perceived? Our purpose calls for us to acknowledge that consumers appreciate what goes into our food, and why – so they can feel good about the choices they make for themselves and their loved ones. In January 2016, we announced // our support for mandatory Transparency is national labeling of products that may contain GMOs. We put the single most the consumer at the center of important everything we do – that’s how ingredient in the we’ve built trust for nearly 150 recipe for building years. We have always believed consumer trust. that consumers have the right to know what’s in their food. //

We have also declared our intention to set the standard for transparency in the food industry. We have been openly discussing our ingredients, including those derived from GMO crops, through our whatsinmyfood.com website. We are supporting digital disclosure and are working to remove artificial colors and flavors from our products. This decision was popular with consumers and customers, but not with some players in the industry. Our support of mandatory federal GMO labeling set a new bar for transparency. Printing a clear and simple statement on the label is the best solution for consumers and for Campbell. How have you prepared your company to operate successfully in the changing consumer environment we face today? We are in a very complex and volatile environment. It is not only nice to have a sense of what’s coming – it is absolutely essential to have a long-term view of what lies ahead. We decided to shift from just being satisfied with operating the business based on insights, to really driving our company to understand and apply foresight to design something actionable. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. It took us 18 months, and we worked with a team of people across the entire enterprise and the leadership team to really do a deep dive into the future forces that will drive the food business and the consumer. In collaboration with Idea Couture, we identified 14 foresights that we would have to pay attention to as a company, and then narrowed those to 4 of the most critical ones that will drive growth for our business. Those literally became the genesis of our strategic plan for the next couple of years. We believe that this will give us the roadmap we need to really adjust and adapt to this changing world. Can you tell us about using these four concepts to design for the future? The foresights are acting as the four pillars of Campbell’s real food strategic plan. The first pillar, Limitless Local, is about people’s relationship with food. It’s about smaller, regional farming where people have a personal understanding of where their food is grown, how it is grown, and the sustainability and ethical sourcing that is involved with it. A great example of this is our recreation of the 1915 recipe for beefsteak tomato soup. The recipe specifically called for local New Jersey beefsteak tomatoes. This proved to be challenging. In the early 20th century, Campbell sourced our tomatoes from New Jersey and the surrounding area. Today, we source most of our tomatoes from California. Ironically, when the team found a New Jersey farm that grew these tomatoes, they learned that the two owners had delivered their grandfather’s tomatoes to Campbell when they were teenagers. This was serendipity, and it is a great example of a Limitless Local story. The second foresight is My.Moments. We learned that consumers are not eating three square meals a day; they are eating multiple times a day, and it is either mini meals or snacking. Snacking today is often

PHOTO: CAMPBELL SOUP COMPANY

running our companies. Any one of these seismic shifts would be huge in and of itself; but they are all converging and accelerating, and that presents a lot of exciting opportunities, as well as challenges.

mindless munching. The foresight gave us a window into the idea of what we call “purposeful snacking.” This includes functional snacks, those that fuel consumers or have a deliberate purpose in their lives. One example of My.Moments can be seen in the advertising of our Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, which is based on the insight that busy moms need a moment for themselves. The idea is that moms are willing to basically share everything with their children – except their Milano. It’s a cute play on that moment and demonstrates a deliberate snacking opportunity. The third foresight, Future Commerce, goes back to what I said before about the seismic shifts in ecommerce and digital. The world of food is becoming omni-channel – we have seen it happen in apparel and electronics and now it is happening in our space. Consumers are looking to buy, shop, and consume food when and where they want. They’re making use of digital technology to order online, seek out recipes, and even have food delivered to their home. We are working diligently to set Campbell up to be more digital and to respond to this changing marketplace. This includes working with our customers to understand what they are doing in digital and working with partners to explore the ramifications and implications of a connected kitchen. We’re doing a lot of work right now to understand the new technologies that are coming at us and to learn how we can participate in and even lead that change. The final foresight is Better.Me. It addresses the many consumers who are concerned about their health and wellbeing. But the real foresight behind Better.Me is the intersection of food, technology, and health and wellbeing. Campbell has expanded in the fresh food space with the acquisitions of Bolthouse Farms and Garden Fresh Gourmet, as well as the organic and natural space with Plum Organics and the pending acquisition of Pacific Foods. These acquisitions have given us a nice platform within the fresh, organic, and functional food space where we can continue to build over time and deliver on consumers’ needs. Millennials in particular are very concerned about offerings in fresh and health and wellbeing, so we need to develop a strong footprint. It’s this foresight that inspired us to fund a new startup company called Habit, which was founded and is led by Neil Grimmer, the entrepreneur who also created our Plum Organics business. Habit is currently in beta testing in San Francisco and is positioned at the intersection of health, technology, and food. It is poised to lead the personalized nutrition revolution. The consumer receives an at-home nutrition test kit, the data is collected and sent to a certified lab, and a profile of the consumer’s nutrition type is determined by their biology, biometrics, lifestyle, and other relevant data. Diets are not one-size-fits-all. Each human being is different, and Habit gets right at the personalized nutrition sweet spot. We can segment consumers based on the types of food they need for their body, and then provide personalized meals for them. Habit is still in its early days, but we’re very excited about new business

models that could emerge from this startup in the area of personalized nutrition, inspired by the Better.Me foresight. What role will Campbell play in the future of food? Campbell is a 148-year-old company, and we are wildly excited about the future of food. If you think about Campbell, we’re very different to many of our peers in the food industry. We have the soul and entrepreneurial spirit of a startup with the scale and assets of a Fortune 500 company. We believe we can be the biggest small company. That means leveraging the best of big for scale, where it matters, and the best of small, which is the authenticity and the realness of our food and our brands. Together, we can make real food affordable and accessible to more people. That’s a very exciting proposition for us, and I believe it is a point of differentiation. Our foresight work has become a part of how we become the biggest small company by strengthening our core business and expanding into faster growing spaces while building a culture of innovation and high performance. We are excited about the future. Any closing thoughts? I couldn’t be more excited about the future of food. Each generation brings its own challenges, and the next generation of consumers is always looking for different things than their parents and grandparents sought. Over the years, Campbell has been able to deliver for our consumers, and we will continue to do so going forward, which is a great opportunity for us. I’ve been in the food business for over 35 years and I have never seen change coming at us at the accelerated rate that it is today. You can either lead change or be a victim of change, and it’s much more fun to lead it. At Campbell, we are looking forward to leading change to provide real food to the next generation of consumers where, when, and how they want it. //// Mat Lincez is VP, IC/ futures at Idea Couture. Maya Oczeretko is a senior innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

Are women being left behind by the biased design of VR experiences? BY RACHEL NOONAN

It was a fresh spring Saturday morning, and I was excited about the adventure I was about to embark on. I was on my way to try some new “experiences” at a documentary film festival VR pop-up. The VR documentaries ranged from a 6 minute piece about an anti-bullying crusader to a 30-minute exploration of a world-famous music festival. When I arrived, I signed my waiver and got ready for the journey, selecting the longest VR doc, with a run time of 30 minutes.

VR is making a substantial impact across multiple industries, from real estate, to medicine, to gaming, to the cinema, and millions have become invested in its seemingly infinite applications. New production studios are opening monthly, and there is always a very curious audience awaiting the newest gaming experience. The experience I was about to be immersed in represented years of software and hardware development and innovation. From the more rudimentary 360°-view VR to the fully immersive environments of today – which use hardware like the Omni treadmill to simulate walking, running, and jumping, as well as haptic gloves, like the Manus VR Development Kit – it is clear that the evolution of VR is still being shaped. This was not my first VR rodeo though. Over the years, I’ve tried some of the earliest prototypes and helped to fund new VR projects as a committee member for an innovation fund that supports bleeding-edge technology development. So, after chatting with the VR popup worker and letting him know I was up to speed, I strapped the headset on and got ready for the documentary. Along with my anticipation was a bit of fear. The first time I had ever put on a headset – and every time since – I had experienced headaches and the spins. I’ve never had a VR experience where I’ve been able to watch past the five-minute mark. Each time I go into the “other world,” I spend the better part of the time wondering whether I’ll be able to tough it out, push past the dizziness, and finally enter another side of consciousness, where I can be one with the headset. I always hope to end up in a place where I can say goodbye to real life and fully immerse myself in one of the many other amazing worlds that storytellers are bringing to life using VR – a format that will be funded to the tune of $30B by 2020. Opening my eyes as I entered into the experience, I suspended my disbelief and tried to relax. From the top of my head to the tips of my toes, I tried to let go, hoping that this would enable my body to move fluidly through the experience. The first five minutes were lovely; the system offered sophisticated navigation options, amazing overhead POV shots, and the choice to capture expansive landscapes. But as I was twisting and turning into the story, I leaned in 100% – and within a minute, VR vertigo became part of my experience. I leaned back out, determined to get through the rest of the experience, but I had a very real concern that I might lose my breakfast if I kept going. Off the headset slid from my head, and off I went to drink some water, negotiate the sensory conflict with my brain, and recalibrate for the day. I left convinced it wasn’t just me. Could I really be the only one who was missing out on the wonders of the VR world? Was I destined to watch while others used VR to progress their minds, bodies, and story experiences? Was I the only one who wouldn’t get to experience all the VR content being created for Oculus Gear, HTC Vive, and the many other headsets entering the marketplace? Once I dove into the research, it became clear that I wasn’t alone. Women are more likely to experience motion sickness than men, a fact that has been well documented over the decades. One large study conducted by Lawther and Griffin in 1988 indicated that the female-to-male ratio for experiencing seasickness symptoms while onboard a ferry was approximately 5:3. Not only are women more likely to experience motion sickness, but their symptoms are also often more acute. Newer research suggests the female-to-male ratio for the incidence of motion sickness symptoms caused by VR is even higher than it is for seasickness, with one 2017 study by Munafo, Diedrick, and Stroffregan (published in Experimental Brain Research) indicating a ratio of 4:1 for vomiting caused by VR.

This means that we are designing an immersive experience that almost half the women in the world may not be able to engage in. They will struggle, get dizzy, vomit, get a taste of what real vertigo is, and perhaps even pass out. This also means that up to 37% of the female population may never buy, create, or consume VR content. While many women are blazing trails and creating beautiful work in VR today, many other women will continue to face significant challenges engaging in the VR industry, which has already required handbooks, manuals, and even quotas to ensure women are included. From the zoetrope, to the camera obscura, to the VR systems of today, humans have long been imagining and designing ways to create illusions. No tool for creating illusions has become so pervasive so quickly and has the potential to impact so many parts of our lives as VR. If women are limited in their ability to participate compared to men, there could be major implications for everything from purchasing behaviors to our social interactions. Is it possible to design VR differently so that everyone can participate? Should we perhaps treat VR like the LaserDisc of innovation, jumping ahead to AR as we once did to DVD? Projections show that AR will receive funding totaling approximately $90M by 2020, and thanks to its less invasive nature on our senses, it could be a better option for those who experience VR-induced motion sickness. By focusing on VR, we could all be distracted by the shiny penny, while AR is really the gold coin that we should be designing for to ensure inclusivity. //// Rachel Noonan is director, marketing, communications and strategy at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and a master of design candidate at OCAD University.

// We are designing an immersive experience that almost half the women in the world may not be able to engage in. //

Convergent Evolution

BY TOM MASTERSON

Design and evolution. To a scientist, using these two words in the same sentence borders on offensive, as it conjures up notions of intelligent design and other pseudoscience. I’m not even sure I would have ever contemplated this article until my recent immersion in the world of design. Natural selection is, of course, the antithesis of what we would commonly think of as design. While design can be iterative, evolution is a system of trial and error on the grandest scale; it has neither stated goals nor briefs. In this natural system, progress is only made by accident and under pressure – which sounds like a bad way to go about designing anything. But what can we learn from evolution to help us become better designers? Hopefully the lesson isn’t to try everything until something works – design firms everywhere would be out of business very quickly if they employed that strategy. Instead, I suggest that by looking at some of the patterns that emerge as a result of evolution, we may find ways to improve our inputs, outputs, and efficiency.

Allow me to pose a simple question: If you had to design an animal that could fly, what would it look like? You are probably already imagining wings, feathers, a beak, and maybe even more specialized bird features, like talons or hollow bones. But from an evolutionary standpoint, powered flight has been accomplished on no fewer than four separate occasions: / / / /

ILLUSTRATION: JENNIFER BACKMAN

A Design Lesson

// The designer must be aligned less on what you want or envision, and more on what the purpose of the project is. //

Birds Insects Reptiles (extinct dinosaurs) Mammals (bats)

Each of these groups has achieved powered flight; in other words, these are all unique instances of the same trait evolving. This phenomenon, a concept known as convergent evolution, illuminates the reality that different groups of organisms can arrive at the same goal in vastly different ways. All of these organisms – with their unique genetic codes, environmental conditions, and restrictions – managed to evolve an ability that humans, for all our progress, can only dream of. What lessons might we take from this and apply to design?

The Brief Matters What pressure drives an animal to develop powered flight? For the insect, flying might have been a means to more easily scour for food or find a mate. For the reptile, it might have been useful for escaping predators. For many birds, although perhaps not the first goal, flight became a way to hunt other animals, survey surrounding areas, and travel great distances to find more favorable climates. In design, this pressure is the brief, and it is pivotally important. The question of “What are we going to deliver to meet the client’s need?” is always surprisingly open to interpretation. I personally think that delivering a clear brief is the most essential skill for a non-designer operating in a design environment to hone – though I don’t believe anyone has perfected it. It seems to me that everyone hands something off to design, only to be either confused or delighted by both the designer’s interpretation of the brief and their application of tremendous skill and creativity. The key to providing the ideal brief is to involve enough freedom to enable the designer to do what they do best, and enough detail to allow them to delight rather than miss the mark.

To achieve this, the designer must be aligned less on what you want or envision, and more on what the purpose of the project is. For example, rather than trying to articulate all the features that constitute a migratory bird, down to the placement of each feather, I would prefer to ask a designer to create an animal that can travel thousands of kilometers to avoid the grim realities of winter. The obvious advantages of flight, such as being impervious to terrain and allowing for straight-line travel, make this feature a necessity. Meanwhile, the need for a physiology that can endure long trips will invariably lead to a great result. Understanding the purpose behind certain features would also allow the designer to infer what features aren’t important – like a thick layer of fat to survive the cold, as the animal will be already be equipped to avoid winter altogether. Careful, though! Not enough detail, and you could find yourself with a migratory insect, like the desert locust.

The Designer Matters

But What If…

Who is executing on the design? What skills will they incorporate? What will their style be? What materials do they have access to? These questions should play heavily into your thought process as you select the person or team that will be realizing your vision. The insect designer is often rather minimalist; very little wasted motion, all lightweight materials. The bat designer might have been more about surprising features, like incorporating hearing heavily into the experience. And some designers will “make it fly” only because you told them to, resulting in the creation of a beautiful talking parrot rather than a beast with any particularly impressive flying capabilities.

One of the constraints of the evolutionary model is that very few organisms can trade features. But what if they could? What would that sort of evolution look like in the context of powered flight? Could birds further reduce their weight by using insectlike exoskeletons? Could bats lend their hearing abilities to a toucan in exchange for a… makeover? We actually do see this in nature, though “see” is a bit of a misnomer. Microbes, particularly bacteria, have become quite adept at trading advantageous traits through a number of mechanisms. Humans are most familiar with their troubling ability to rapidly gain resistance to drugs. Indeed, this can happen between distinct species of bacteria, as full genes are often replicated and given to neighbors. What can we learn from the “what if” scenario above? In the world of design and its many applications, we are often afforded the opportunity to get inputs from experts and specialists. With this multidisciplinary approach, we can take a cue from business, a sprinkle of something technical, and top it all off with some design – then, we will start to see all sorts of amazing things happen. So, to answer my own question… if I had to design a flying animal, I’d probably gather experts on bats, birds, dinosaurs, and insects, let them ask me a ton of questions about why I want this, and have them contribute their best ideas. Oh, and I’d have a designer with me from the beginning. ////

Timing Matters Whenever I ask designers how we can help them do their best work, I am told the same thing: They want to get involved early. If a designer is aware of the restrictions or needs they must accommodate, they can be much more thoughtful in their approach. For example, if hovering is important to your flying animal, the designer needs to know this before they produce a bulky eagle-like design, giving them time to opt instead for a hummingbird, or better yet, an insect that is even more tailored to hovering. If you pigeonhole a designer (forgive the pun), you often force them to take a sub-optimal approach – or, at the very least, a costly one – to achieve what you want. And sometimes, no matter how good your designer is, it can be too late to incorporate something you want. Those gorgeous wings on the butterfly simply can’t be added to your run-of-the-mill pigeon to spruce it up. Even between closely related animals, one can’t simply trade features. You’ll just have to start from scratch, as painful as that may be.

Tom Masterson is a senior healthcare innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

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// The key to providing the ideal brief is to involve enough freedom to enable the designer to do what they do best, and enough detail to allow them to delight. //

A Cacophony of Sound Exploring IoT and Sonic Experience Design

A Brief History of Sonic Interaction Design

BY DAV E D ER BY

During the busiest moments of a normal workday, I am bombarded by snippets of sounds. Outlook’s calendar reminds me of events and emails with arpeggios and bells; a Slack message announces itself with rapid-fire triplets of percussive clicks; and Skype gurgles periodically, reminding me it’s there in the background should I need it. Though I occasionally take the time to customize these sounds, mostly I don’t bother, because I’ve already learned to discern which sounds go with which applications in the “soundscape” of my work environment. Though I do really love the water plop Twitter makes, the various clicks and clacks that signal micro-interactions on the Messenger app, Gmail’s optimistic glockenspiel riff, and even the goofy song Skype plays while dialing a call, I tend to think of these sounds as one-off add-on features that I don’t particularly miss when they are muted. When I am busy doing other things, like listening to music, trying to talk to Alexa or Siri, or using Shazam to identify a song I’m hearing over the speakers in a café, I see (and hear) these sounds as distractions. Even the best-intentioned and best-designed sounds manage to annoy me sometimes. And though I could potentially customize these sounds and when they occur, I always just turn them on or off.

This bombardment of sounds from our devices is the way most of us currently experience what is sometimes referred to as “sonic interaction design” (or, sound’s role as one of the principal channels conveying information, meaning, and emotional qualities in interactive contexts). There is a growing belief that sound has the potential to play a more meaningful role in technology. Evidence of this belief is surfacing on blogs, in YouTube videos, in posts from LinkedIn groups, and occasionally in job descriptions. But we’ve been here before. Back in the 90s, I was working as an information architect and attending graduate school in New York City at the height of the dot-com gold rush. It was around this time, during the height of the dot-com mania, that Beatnik – a well-funded Bay-Area company founded by new-wave 80s recording artist Thomas Dolby – began talking about “sonifying” the web. Beatnik created toolkits for developers to develop sound palettes that would enable a sound to play for every interaction on their website. English musician Brian Eno had famously designed the Windows 95 start-up sound a few years before, so it only made sense that the man who wrote “She Blinded Me With Science” would bring meaningful sonic order to the web. There was a growing sense in the nascent digital scene at the end of the last century that it was only a matter of time before the web outgrew its penchant for MIDI/ audio autoplay and self-indulgent Flash sites and got serious about sound. Meanwhile, more pessimistic and data-driven user research voices pointed out that users were all too often voting with their mute buttons and literally tuning out the sounds that well-intentioned sound designers were creating. Nevertheless, the more hopeful and earnest argued that the internet couldn’t remain silent: Sounds just had to be designed more thoughtfully, they countered. Suffice it to say that the revolution of a fully sonified internet didn’t really happen – at least not on the scale people were predicting. The dot-com crash ensued and the breathless promise of Thomas Dolby’s dream, as well as the career trajectories of interactive sound designers at leading digital agencies, fizzled with it.

Sound Design in Other Media

The Role of Sound in Product Design

Sound Design and IoT Devices

Of course, even though the sonified internet never came to be, there is still a rich history of sound design application in other media, including art, film, television, gaming, and interactive experiences. It’s almost impossible to talk about the history of sound design without invoking the names of John Cage, Nam June Paik, the Fluxus movement, Steve Reich, and Alvin Lucier, among others who helped to change the way we think about sound in art and the way we interact with it in physical spaces. Canadian composer and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer, author of the seminal 1977 book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, literally set the stage for how future sound designers would think of sound with his invention of terms such as “soundscape” and “schizophonia.” In 1979, Walter Murch was the first person credited as a sound designer on a film for his groundbreaking work on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. From sound design’s early days as Foley (or sound replacement) in film and theater – where sound designers work with recordings to mimic or enhance the sounds of environmental spaces not captured by film cameras – the field has evolved, with modern techniques now including the use of audio sampling and synthesis to create soundscapes for future and imagined environments.

Much of early sound design for industrial products was focused on reducing the noise of those products. Perhaps not surprisingly, digital product design started with a relatively minimalist approach. For example, the designers of the iconic Pong game designed its two sounds, the digital re-creation of a paddle hitting a ball and the roar of a crowd, which were added almost reluctantly as afterthoughts. The game designer famously doubted whether users would even care. While the role of sound in games has changed considerably since its humble beginnings, sonic interaction design as it pertains to digital products and services has remained quite sensibly restrained in its approach. With the coming of what has been identified as the “third wave” of human–computer interaction – which involves the incorporation of human factors and usability into user experience and what is being called “emotional design” – as well as the opportunities and design challenges presented by emerging and already-established technologies and form factors, the role of sound in interaction design and user experience will only continue to grow in importance. The huge success of smartphones and tablets has provided platforms for more ambitious applications of sound design in apps and other digital products and services. For example, RjDj and the more recent Here One Smart Earbuds created by Here Active Listening allow users to remix and recontextualize environmental sounds around them. The makers of Here One are working on creating wireless earbuds, similar to those worn by Joaquin Phoenix in the movie Her, which they say will allow users to both “tune in and tune out the world” when used in tandem with an app that lets users cancel out select sounds, choose digital signal processing effects to add delays, or add flanges to real-world sounds. Additionally, there has been one significant application of sound in the last few years that may have the most potential to impact the nascent practice of sonic interaction design: the use of sound in AI-powered assistants, such as Siri and Alexa. Building on improvements in speech recognition software, these systems use voice as both an input and output.

While these offerings are interesting as standalone products, the possibilities become more intriguing as we imagine a real IoT that requires devices not only to engage with us as users, but also to talk to each other in order to regulate and harmonize connected homes and cities. With the promise of this technology comes new sonic interaction design challenges on the individual product level (e.g. Should a tub of tofu passing its expiry make a sound, and if so, what kind of sound?) as well as the systemic level (e.g. How do we effectively tune and meaningfully differentiate the birdsongs of our smart devices?). How will we ensure that smart devices in a connected IoT effectively divide labor? Will a network of devices that all make use of sonic interaction design just sound awful? Imagine a connected home in which various household appliances screech to tell you that you are running low on laundry detergent and multiple voice assistants compete for your attention. The work of sound designers would be essential for curating and taming these worlds. As sonic interaction and brand designers begin future proofing for the Internet of Sound, which is just around the corner, it might be time for us to start reading R. Murray Schafer again. Beyond just future proofing and tuning the soundscape of connected homes and cities, sound designers will need to imagine interactions that don’t necessarily involve human ears; IoT devices will need to learn to listen to one another. Colleen Fahey and Anne-Sophie Moretti of audio branding agency Sixième Son detail how sound can be used in smart

cities in their article “Moving From Internet of Things to Internet of Sound.” They state: “On the other side of sound, listening rather than transmitting, the most exciting application appears to be in creating smart cities. With the help of acoustic intelligence, the installation of sensors throughout cities allows better safety and mobility.” While the IoT presents both opportunities and challenges for sonic interaction design, VR – and, to a lesser extent, AR – will provide opportunities for sonic experience design. In contrast to the design challenges of connected homes and cities, with their many devices and sounds creating the potential for cacophony, VR offers the opportunity to create immersive worlds in

which rich multilayered sonic landscapes are required to make experiences feel more real. As University of Southern California student Alex Lyon explains in a 2016 Gamasutra blog post, “In VR, ambient sounds, such as the grass rustling in the wind and beneath your feet or the clanging of swords against shields, will be necessary to keep the player immersed in the game. In contrast, the introduction of random music while the player is running around fields or in caves would likely be immersion breaking.” The close symbiosis between sound design, character voicing, and scores in contemporary game design, as well as the practice of Foley, will undoubtedly inform and inspire sound

// Imagine a connected home in which various household appliances screech to tell you that you are running low on laundry detergent. //

design in VR and AR, where additive soundscapes are used to make experiences more immersive and emotionally robust. There is an interesting future ahead for sonic interaction design and, beyond that, sonic experience design. Though we aren’t quite there yet, the complex challenges of future proofing the Internet of Sound and the rich opportunities for holistic sound design in VR may lead to UX practitioners in the not-so-distant future embracing sound design. Who knows? Digital agencies of the future might actually hire people who specialize in it. //// Dave Derby is director, experience strategy at Idea Couture.

Eight Parklet Principles to Guide Urban Customer Experience Design

The Principles of Parklets

and maintained by private sponsors; it is blended into the sidewalk, but it poses an aesthetic intervention; it is urban, yet it is also green; it is in a car parking space, yet it promotes biking and walking. The unique form of the parklet has offered retail spaces, coffee shops, and businesses a novel tactic to attract and engage urban consumers. These spaces also offer a clear ROI, with representatives from businesses with parklets – including Ritual Coffee Roasters, Dandelion Chocolate, Samovar Tea, Réveille, and Four Barrel – claiming that these spaces increase foot traffic, customer length of stay, street credibility, visibility, and perceived neighborhood value. By studying the parklet as a microcosm of successful experience design, we can glean several lessons about how to best design for the modern urban consumer.

PHOTO: SAN FRANCISCO PLANNING DEPARTMENT

Parklet: A small seating area or green space created as a public amenity on or alongside a sidewalk, especially in a former roadside parking space. — San Francisco Planning Department, 2013

In 2005, a small San Francisco design firm, Rebar, staged an urban intervention by converting a parking spot on a busy street into a miniature play space. The new space included AstroTurf, planter boxes, a bench or two, and a table for enjoying a coffee date. Rebar called it PARK(ing). Though tiny in scale, this PARK(ing) intervention offered a simple reframe of what the city street and its corresponding community interactions might look like. PARK(ing) caught on and evolved, giving birth to a global network of permanent “parklets” sprawled across urban sidewalks, with over 50 in San Francisco alone. The parklet flips conventional street space on its head through its hybrid nature – it is public land, yet it is funded

Parklets demonstrate how experience design can mutually benefit public and private entities by responding to basic population needs – in this case, the need for a pleasant place to sit, socialize, and escape. Rather than creating friction between cities and businesses, parklets demonstrate how actively working with cities to design services and spaces for residents can allow a business to better understand and align with community interests and progress, making for a more resonate and sustainable model.

In an on-the-go urban environment, parklets demonstrate the power of slowing consumers down to capture more value and engagement out of each visit. For instance, by simply offering a few more places to sit, a parklet can shift the transactional nature of a cramped coffee shop, creating an environment in which a customer may order more or place higher value on their visit. A parklet can help transform a café or shop into a destination where consumers may consider working for an afternoon or planning a meeting. According to a 2008 Harvard Business Review article by Frances X. Frei on customer service, this change can justify the higher-priced goods required to fund the atmosphere.

Parklets offer a new medium for local collaboration rather than competition, as neighboring stores can invest in and design a parklet together. This collaboration can increase the overall perceived value of the street and the neighborhood as a whole, as well as the perceived value of the collaborators’ storefronts and surrounding storefronts. In an environment where consumers value craft and local experiences, investing in and lifting up the value and distinct culture of a neighborhood can build trust, credibility, and loyalty.

Invest in public-private partnerships.

What can we learn about designing for the urban consumer from San Francisco’s sidewalk interventions?

BY BETH JOHNSON AND GINNY MILLER

Parklet Example: Over the course of five years, nine parklets have popped up across Valencia, a street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Once a tenuous part of town, Valencia has shifted to become a hip (and hipster) hotbed of retail, restaurants, cleanliness, and community appeal – thanks in part to parklets. This has helped to drive up neighborhood value and foot traffic, as well as to support the city’s safety and cleanliness.

Capture value from the lingering customer.

Parklet Example: The COO of Four Barrel Coffee reports that the coffee shop’s parklet often causes customers to stick around, order food, and meet up with friends. “There are just more people around,” he explains. “We’re not a full-serve restaurant – we just have a line. But this lets people stay without turning over tables.”

Promote your neighbors to promote yourself.

Parklet Example: On Valencia Street in San Francisco, The Crepe House shares a parklet with a neighboring kebab spot. When the kebab shop owner was asked to describe how the relationship between the two businesses works, he responded: “We’re great neighbors and friends with the crepe guys – it’s easy, really... it’s good for both of us to have more people around.”

Capture a broader audience through open-ended interactions and play. Parklets are intentionally dynamic in their design. They often tout movable pieces or use space in a playful way, using geometric benches and panels that invite people to invent and interpret new ways of using the space. For example, users might deliver a street performance from a “podium,” sun bathe, use the space as a play structure, or treat it as a skateboard ramp (to the frustration of the shop owner). Though it requires the shops to sacrifice some control, this diversity in space and interaction caters to the diversity among urban consumers. Parklet Example: Designed by Gehl Architects, swissnex’s San Francisco parklet is designed to be a “modular stage for discussion, performances, screenings, workshops, relaxation, and more.” It has movable, modular furniture that can form a bench for chatting or a stage for impromptu theater. The parklet brings more visibility to swissnex – a center for Swiss art, education, and innovation – and invites the neighboring community and beyond to actively engage.

A required principle of parklets is that their design is infused with plants and greenery. In line with trends such as vertical or rooftop gardens, this design principle shifts what it means to be surrounded by “nature” in increasingly crowded urban landscapes. Parklets demonstrate how successful urban experience design might involve bringing the delight and appeal of nature to the consumer where they least expect it (i.e. in a parking spot).

Parklets are hyper-local by design – from the materials they use (i.e. local driftwood) to the architects they employ, to the community they engage. A good parklet capitalizes on its community’s unique assets, inspiration, and potential to promote placemaking – it can make even a chain restaurant feel like a neighborhood establishment. According to Ethan Kent of the Project for Public Spaces, “placemaking” or “place capital” can drive loyalty and brand connection for a business, as “we are more discerningly and deliberately choosing to identify ourselves with places we feel express our identity, or to use places as a way to express our identity.”

As building rent prices surge and supply becomes more limited, parklets offer a creative solution to the problem of space and demand management. Parklets turn parking space, which adds little value to the business, into a sink for overflowing consumers. This is particularly attractive when catering to transient millennial and Gen Z consumers, who desire flexibility in their interactions. These consumers want the intimate space of a small coffee shop without needing to feel rushed or overwhelmed. Parklets are exemplary of how businesses can seek creative ways to manage the somewhat unpredictable or highly variable ebbs and flows of their consumers.

Sitting in parklets and holding a branded cup of coffee, or perhaps a bag with a store’s name on it, customers can serve as a business’s grassroots marketing team. They extend visibility into what a business has to offer beyond its store walls, piquing natural intrigue from passersby. Particularly, as more urban food-andbeverage businesses focus on the craftsmanship and aesthetic appeal of their offerings, parklets are becoming a powerful tool for visibility. In the same vein of Instagram marketing or consumer-produced content, parklets are a low-overhead example of how to capture value by leveraging your consumers as brand advocates.

Facilitating surprise and delight through green intervention.

Parklet Example: In an effort to increase foot traffic outside their shop while also enhancing the street and neighborhood, Cinderella Bakery and Café sponsored a parklet that serves as a lush garden reprieve. Covered in planter boxes that host succulents, local wildflowers, and even herbs (used for cooking and garnishing in the shop), this parklet entices local neighbors, cross-city visitors, and tourists alike.

Co-create with the community to promote placemaking.

Parklet Example: In the western outskirts of San Francisco by Ocean Beach, Trouble Coffee hosts a parklet that celebrates the neighborhood’s identity as a seaside escape – reminding consumers that, despite their proximity to the bustle of the city, they are just minutes from the ocean. The parklet is constructed from local driftwood and plays off an existing eucalyptus tree, with the tree’s trunk extended into the parklet and serving as an unconventional bench.

Build resilient infrastructure that adapts according to demand.

Parklet Example: The flux of customers at San Francisco’s trendy Samovar Tea Bar can be extreme, varying from leisurely lulls mid-week to lines around the block on weekends. The parklet in front of the shop has enabled the Tea Bar to accommodate customers during these surges. Customers can now sit and enjoy the space and the tea, without the shop needing to expand its space in the high-rent district.

Give customers the tools to boost your brand’s street cred.

Parklet Example: Dandelion Chocolate uses its parklet as a way to activate the sweet tooth of people passing by. As one Dandelion Chocolate shop employee noted, “How can you not enter our shop after walking by someone sitting in the parklet, who’s sipping delicious hot chocolate with homemade marshmallows on top?” ////

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Beth Johnson is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

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Ginny Miller is an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School.

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Irresistible: How Designers Became the Linchpin in the Business of Addiction

Designing Addiction If there is a technological addiction epidemic, “patient zero” is the pathological gambler found in Las Vegas, that carnivalesque enclave of abandon built for people wishing to escape the banality of their everyday lives. In Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll describes how the physical and digital shapes of casinos and slot machines have been designed intentionally for addiction. Although it seems that the gambler freely chooses to interact with the machine, she is at the mercy of complex, intentionally designed data-gathering and surveillance technology. Schüll sees an asymmetric collusion in the co-production of the addictive interaction between the user and the designer. The designer has the information and power to create

the conditions for addiction, but the neoliberal expectation is that the user is fully responsibility for the choice to play. Similar forms of design manipulation and coercion occur in our everyday lives. Tristan Harris, an ex-Googler and “design ethicist,” has been sharing the ways in which internet companies use “technological hijacks on psychological vulnerabilities” in order to keep users hooked. For example, the alluring chimes of notifications are used as intermittent variable rewards in order to cultivate a user’s fear of missing out (also known as FOMO). “Like” buttons on social media and near-miss deals (think “50% off today only!”) borrow from gambling innovation to drive consumers’ need to stay on devices as much as possible. All of this reveals the spreading of a design ethos that normalizes psychological exploitation in the pursuit of desirability. How did designers find themselves complicit actors within this business of addiction?

PHOTO: NEGATIVESPACE

BY CHERYL HSU

Shifting the Burden to “What People Want” Addiction is fascinating. At its core, it is about the paradox of freedom and autonomy. Here we have the philosophical puzzle of akrasia, described by Socrates as the state of acting against one’s better judgment. The modern individual is told that she chooses her addiction by opting into a social media platform or buying a phone. However, this “choice” does not always seem to belong to the self-interested, rational, and economic person. Is it in anyone’s long-term self-interest to neglect work in favor of binging on Netflix or obsessively scrolling through Instagram? Addiction shows us that “desire” is more complex than just “what people want.” An addict might desire a drug and want to quit that drug at the same time. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt outlines the tension between an action-determining volition, known as a first-order desire (e.g. “I want to watch Netflix”) and a higher-order volition, called a second-order desire (e.g. “I want to stop procrastinating on Netflix and do my taxes”). Frankfurt sees free will as a person’s ability to consciously determine her actions by allowing her higher-order volition to overcome her first-order desire. To be free is to have the ability to become the person you want to be and to want what you want to want. No one knows what people want better than the human-centered designer. In the hyper-accelerated digital economy, designers have become what philosopher Michel Foucault calls the “technicians of desire.” The predominant design-thinking philosophy emphasizes empathy as a way to get into the minds of users and intimately understand their needs and desires. Designers know that users don’t always rationally know what they want. People are not computational agents who always seek to achieve the optimal expected outcomes; instead, they rely on their intuition and other systematic cognitive biases to make decisions. Equipped with this power of understanding human decision making, designers have the skillset and knowledge required to cause changes in behavior by appealing to people’s unconscious needs and desires. However, the great power of design and empathy is often used to subtly steer desires for social manipulation and to generate profit – in other words, to addict people. As designers get better at knowing how to make their products desirable for consumption, they become infinitely more hirable for tech companies. In an economy where attention is a precious and scarce resource, successful user experience is increasingly measured by time spent on a device. The more time we, the consumers, spend online, the more data is accumulated about our desires and interests. This data feeds right back to the designers, who use their insights to design even more irresistible products. In the absence of intervention through regulation or a transparent ethical code, design incentives are being developed with only business profitability and scale in mind. Natasha Dow Schüll’s alarming description of the purposefully addictive casinos of Las Vegas illustrates a pocket of a future in which the extractive digital economy of attention sees an end game in addicting all users. In this future, these addicts will ask only for their “fix” – and designers will become their willing dealers.

Confessing Addiction It’s easy to jump to a black-and-white narrative: There is an evil cabal of technologists and capitalists determined to take advantage of and profit from our attention. This neoliberal, profit-maximizing, marketobsessive elite is deliberately creating the conditions for addiction – including the necessary incentives and systems – simply because passive users are more profitable for tech companies. Perhaps there is some truth to that story. But it is also crucial to ask how these designers and technologists themselves might be addicted to ideological systems. The anesthetizing delusions happening in technology design are manifold; the dominant design principles of delight, seamlessness, and invisibility reinforce the business objectives of speed, growth, and scale within a capitalist system. Any harm done to the user is made to seem banal or invisible by the self-preserving system. In this way, designers defer their responsibility to the readymade answers given by an organizational culture that purports to “do no evil.” The first step to addiction recovery is to admit you are addicted. Similarly, if designers confess their complicity in harmful design, design as a field can begin to develop an ethical conscience. Designers who develop new technologies must now consider the needs and desires of all people; they must become responsible for the lives and experiences of the billions of people who they design for. Designed artifacts become a part of the complex network of actors with which we all must cohabit – this network can support us with dignity, or it can hook us with addiction. By making discourse around ethics a priority, designers will avoid letting the “neutral” platforms they work for off the hook when it comes to addictive design. Designers must choose the discomfort of interrogating and challenging the status quo of the organizations they work for. To be ethically responsible for the desires of their users is not a simple task for designers, but it is the work of designers to patiently tease through and untangle complex, nuanced problems, and empower users to become who they want to be. //// Cheryl Hsu is a design researcher and consultant in Toronto and a graduate of the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at OCAD University.

AI Isn’t All You Need

B Y T H EO FO R B AT H

What I’m about to posit may get me some blowback, but, as my peers and colleagues know, I’m not one for complacency. Sometimes, you need to traverse tough terrain to get to your destination. And to guarantee your fellow travelers have an engaging ride.

People want to be involved – and have others involved – in their product experiences.

So, here it goes: Behind every good robot lies an even better human. As technology continues to impact even the most fundamental aspects of our daily lives – like getting our annual medical checkup, watching TV, communicating with our parents and children, planning social outings or vacations, earning a college degree, or applying for a job – we’re demanding more from the products we love. No longer are we satisfied with how a product looks and feels; we expect it to enhance our lives in a significant, memorable way. Take Facebook’s recent appropriation of Snapchat-like features. The social media Goliath appears to be pilfering apps to stay relevant and maintain its edge by delivering valuable services to users. Service design has become both king and queen, and I would argue that a company that launches a product – whether that product is a car, phone, hotel, school, or even a political candidate – without supporting it with a digital ecosystem is sure to lose money.

Not everyone wants to literally kiss their gadgets, but the ability to interact and give/receive pleasure with and through products is becoming expected. Users want their brands to both delight and interact with them on an emotional, as well as functional, level. Engineers, designers, and marketers of products – and their attendant services – need to be mindful that the purchasers of those products are humans, not automatons. Mutual respect and trust must be forged between user and producer to facilitate brand bonding. When a user is at one with a product, the manufacturer of said product knows it has created a hit, and probably a lucrative one. Conversely, when consumers sense a lack of human involvement, brand loyalists grow wary. They love the magic of technology, but if they intuit that there’s no heart in a product experience, then they opt out. I call this the “zombie phenomenon,” as it happens when users get spooked. This usually occurs when a company doesn’t consider service design during the concept stage of their development. People will fall out of love with a product that doesn’t feel sensible, or that feels too robotic. For example, when even the most trusting, adventurous of passengers deduces that there’s no one behind the steering wheel – or behind the algorithm – of a driverless car, they won’t get in! Deep learning is where companies at the forefront of innovation can literally lose customers. It’s also where they can make great technological advances. Ah, there lies the conundrum. Net-net: AI without human management is an example of a gray area where more attention to good service design could be helpful.

PHOTO: JEN BACKMAN

Human-Centered Service Design Makes for Good Business

Here’s why: People want to be knowledgeable.

People want to love their product.

Companies that help their customers become, or at least seem, smarter are poised for growth. For example, a California charter school district, Summit Public Schools, is franchising its personalized learning platform in order to boost performance and increase “knowledge sharing” nationwide. Summit students learn via a combination of online and in-class instruction, working collaboratively as well as individually. The beauty of the system is that the technology professes to succeed only if the teacher is on board with the program. No human, no success. One school road-testing the personalized learning approach reported parental concern about teachers “parking children in front of screens.” This presented a perfect teaching moment for Summit. The way in which a product is managed and interacted with by its users – in this case, the parents and the teachers – can make or break its ability to go viral. Summit seems to be weathering its growing pains by forging ahead with its innovative learning platform while supporting the emotional concerns of the parents. So what’s the service design grade for Summit? So far, it’s an A. YouTube, on the other hand, should get a C- for its recent algorithmic reconfiguration that left many creators in the lurch, including independent radio show host David Pakman, who is now scrambling for ad funding to keep his popular grassroots programming on the air. Like deep learning, this could be perceived as a “Big Brother,” more negative side of AI, a side that questions First Amendment rights. Who decides what topics get advertising support and which don’t? YouTube (aka Google)? Maybe. And perhaps all would have been okay if the tech giant had anticipated the fallout of its decisions and attended to its users. If companies remember that the driver of any online experience is a human being who wants to be enhanced or improved in some way – whether that is becoming more politically savvy by listening to Pakman or more test-savvy by attending a Summit Basecamp – then they’ll always get an A+.

The good news is that once you hook someone, it’s easy to keep them coming back for more. As long as a company reliably churns out cutting-edge and lovely products with seamless service ecosystems, said company can almost own a category. Apple is exemplary in this sense. They almost never forget their users and when they do, they try to remedy the situation as swiftly and expertly as possible. Yes, there’s competition in their marketplace, but for the most part, Apple people are brand loyalists. They know the company will continue evolving, innovating, and attending to their needs. In this regard, Apple keeps an eye on the relationship they have with their human consumers while invisibly integrating the bot side of the UX. But what happens when a brand lets its users down? Similar to the AI example above, which demonstrates how deep learning needs human monitoring to provide users the security and reliability they expect from the brands they love, Facebook got more questions of morality and responsibility than “likes” when it came to the Cleveland, Ohio murder footage. So, while AI, AR, and VR are essential to the technological advancement of product design and development, we can’t forget that a “human touch” must be behind, or at least somewhat present, in a brand’s relationship with its clients. Even low-touch humans want to feel important, valued by, and trusting of the companies whose products or experiences they opt into. Winning brands understand that a wellthought-out approach to service design is critical to creating products that customers rely on to improve and/or simplify their lives. The bar continues to rise as bot-brains become ubiquitous. Like the Wizard of Oz, we need to keep human involvement behind the curtain of innovation and brand evolution. //// Theo Forbath is chief transformation officer, VP at Idea Couture and a member of the executive leadership team at Cognizant Digital Business.

Think again. A must-read for marketers, designers, and brand and insight managers.

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Thought you had Gen Z all figured out?

Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation

Humans and Innovation

When Everything is Connected

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Available on Amazon and at bookstores around the world.

The M/I/S/C/ Guide to Design Thinking

Human Insights

Wearables

Spaces + Places of Care

The Future According to Women

Winning the Next Game

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Buy the World a Coke

B Y A N N E S TA K E

The Coca-Cola Company’s distribution channels famously ensure that you can enjoy a Coke anywhere on the planet. However, with the exception of a few consumer goods companies, very few international brands have been able to reach the 5 billion people who live on less than $10 per day.

Designing Your Way into Emerging Markets It’s not for a lack of trying. Since the publication of C.K. Prahalad’s 2004 book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, many multinational corporations have been enamored with the promise of high-volume, low-margin business models. Other “how to succeed in emerging markets” manuals followed, including the influential Jugaad Innovation by Radjou, Prabhu, and Ahuja (2012) and Frugal Innovation: How to Do More with Less by Prabhu and Radjou (2015). Yet despite the hype and how-to manuals, the “fortune” to be found in emerging markets remains largely elusive. As Ruchika Singhal, Vice President International at CR Bard, noted in a recent conversation, “Companies have invested heavily in ‘innovative technologies’ for emerging markets only to run up against barriers that are not only economic, but also behavioral and structural.” How do we overcome these barriers and finally deliver value at scale for the hitherto unreachable? After spending the past five years working across different sectors and building social enterprises from India and China to Rwanda and Tanzania, I have a few thoughts about what works – and what doesn’t – in these emerging markets. The insights I’ve gleaned through my work draw heavily from the evolving field of design. By design, I don’t mean fashion or graphic design, or even product design, but rather the underlying principals, methodologies, and processes that guide the practice.

The Product-Dumping Paradigm

Beyond Frugal Innovation

Before it is possible to explore what design could mean for businesses in emerging markets going forward, it is important to understand the dominant strategy employed by international companies today. Most companies sell to local distributors and then turn the other way: Everything that happens in the market afterwards is a black box. Often, companies have no idea where their products are sold, what types of customers are buying their products, or at what price. Even when their brands do have a local presence, international companies often make the wrong assumptions. Terry Behan – CEO and Head of Strategic Design at Afro Celtic, a South African design firm that works with a range of international clients – recently explained, “We see multinationals swoop into emerging markets with a pre-wired assumption that customers want their product or service. But there’s not always an obvious need for what they’re selling.” What some companies fail to realize is that emerging markets are advanced in their own right, with their own sets of local substitutes, unique preferences, cultural norms, and political systems that greatly complicate the product-dumping approach.

Recently, many businesses have recognized that dumping products into emerging markets may not be the optimal strategy, and some have instead adopted lessons from Frugal Innovation to build a more human-centric approach to product design. The principle of frugal innovation is about going back to the fundamentals of design that have been lost along the journey toward increasingly higher margins. Rather than driving customers to upgrade to an ever-expanding set of features, frugal innovation aims to understand the user’s specific context before delivering essential functionality for a fraction of the cost. The most popular example of this principle in action is the Tata Nano, a car that sells in India for about $2,000. Another success story is the Jaipur Foot, a low-cost prosthetic limb that has changed the lives of millions of disabled users in emerging markets. While frugal innovation is necessary for addressing the needs of the bottom five billion consumers, focusing on products alone will do little to overcome structural, economic, and behavioral barriers. This is why, in my own work, I have instead relied heavily on four essential design capabilities that can help businesses overcome these barriers: empathy-driven research, systems thinking, business model innovation, and strategic iteration. Here, I will show each of these capabilities in practice using examples from my work with Mobisol, an off-grid solar energy business, and Medtronic, a multinational healthcare company.

Empathy – the ability to experience the world from another perspective – is at the core of design. Researching with empathy is about approaching the users, market, and culture without assumptions in order to generate insights. When I was in Tanzania working for Mobisol, a solar energy company tailored to consumers in developing nations, the team used immersive research methodologies and ethnography to connect with customers and understand their unique context. Rather than staying at our desks, we sat with customers in their kitchens, in their cassava fields, and in their shops. As we listened to stories from users across the country, we developed insights that later led to a new micro health insurance product and a new financial literacy tool. As a result, Mobisol was able to de-risk their portfolio, and customers were able to avoid losing their solar energy systems. Without spending time in the customers’ context, we wouldn’t have developed a useful product, and both Mobisol and our users would have been worse off. Empathydriven research isn’t a nice-to-have in emerging markets: It’s a must-have.

Design Capability #2: Systems Thinking Once companies understand the immediate context of their customers, it is essential that they understand how the human fits into higher-level systems. Systems thinking is about understanding and mapping relationships between entities in order to surface pain points, bottlenecks, and potential leverage points. While I was working with Medtronic, we used systems thinking to develop an offering for consumers in India who had suffered traumatic brain injuries. At first, we thought the value proposition was clear: We would sell cheaper versions of our existing trauma and neurosurgery products in Tier 2 or government hospitals. In practice, though, we found that products were secondary to truly creating an impact for consumers with traumatic brain injuries. Our team spent hours riding in ambulances on the feeder highways and crowded streets of Bangalore. We spent late nights and early mornings in packed trauma wards, mapping patient journeys, and interviewing nurses, technicians, doctors, patients, and families. By gaining an understanding of the system, we came to realize that we needed to engage a coalition of stakeholders, including ambulance providers, the Ministry of Health, the state-level government, low-cost medical technology startups, and the police. This was a radical shift in strategy for Medtronic, a product-driven company focused on delivering best-in-class medical technology. In order to truly create change in any system-level problem, businesses will increasingly need to broker partnerships and build solutions that reach across sectors. Like empathydriven research, systems thinking is a must-have.

Design Capability #3: Business Model Innovation The “fortune” at the bottom of the pyramid described by Prahalad is based on the promise that businesses can realize financial success; business model innovation is about creating revenue streams that will deliver on that promise. However, this is not as simple as fitting an existing framework to a solution. Innovators need to find the right combination of technology, customer touchpoints, and external partnerships to create a model that balances the constraints of the market with the financial needs of the business. When Medtronic developed a solution for trauma care in India, for example, there were few existing business model frameworks from which to draw inspiration. In this case, patients weren’t paying directly for products or services. Instead, Medtronic developed a public–private partnership, whereby the government paid for a system overhaul alongside other stakeholders in the ecosystem. This approach was a total departure from Medtronic’s traditional sales-driven business model. As the lines between government and business are increasingly blurred, this business model will become increasingly important – especially to reach those who need services the most. Business model innovation requires a company to be comfortable charting entirely new territory; it also requires that businesses stop thinking in terms of existing frameworks and start defining their own.

Design Capability #4: Strategic Iteration Top-down, directive strategy rarely works for emerging markets. Instead, businesses need to receive constant feedback from the field and be flexible enough to respond to that feedback. They need to prototype everything, from new internal processes to new customer-facing products or services. Across every organization I’ve worked with in emerging markets, the biggest challenge has been striking the ideal balance between structure and flexibility. Even in the most design-savvy organizations, internal processes are not always human-centered. Strategies developed at national offices are usually not optimized for the realities on the ground; as a result, these strategies are lost in translation. Often, there are no feedback mechanisms for those working in the field to influence decision making. Immediately after strategies are devised, they are often rolled out across the country without making space for pilots or iterations. Despite the clarity and control that comes with top-down direction, ambiguity defines emerging markets. Businesses need to build processes that are flexible in a changing environment. PHOTO: BEN FRANSKE

Design Capability #1: Empathy-Driven Research

// Design is much more than a tool for economic success: It is also a powerful instrument for reframing how businesses conceptualize value in the first place. //

Going Beyond the “Fortune” The allure of emerging markets is obvious: More than half of the global population has yet to be reached by most international companies, and if businesses can figure out how to serve this population, the promise of a “fortune” is real. Design capabilities will likely be a powerful driver of business success on the ground in these economies. But design is much more than a tool for economic success. It is also a powerful instrument for reframing how businesses conceptualize value in the first place. It is impossible to be that close to the user without striving to deliver products and services that change lives for the better. The tools of design, being so heavily embedded within the lived experiences of people in the contexts of their cultures and societies, require that businesses consider social value alongside economic value. It is through this understanding that the transformational power of design for business might be realized. //// Anne Stake is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

Thinking

Isn’t for

Just Designers

You probably already know the term “design thinking.” Odds are, you’ve read an article or two on how design thinking became a business buzzphrase. Maybe you’ve even read an article on how non-designers’ generic adaption of design thinking risks ruining the creative integrity and innovative nature inherent to the process. But have you ever thought about using design thinking yourself? At the risk of offending some purists, I’d venture to say that every businessperson would benefit from embodying the traits of a design thinker. While many people in the tech and innovation industries already know this, not everyone has had a chance to see what design thinking can do for them. I’d argue that design thinking’s successes in transforming many companies for the better shows us it’s worthwhile. Business life cannot be all financial statements and Six Sigma processes – there’s room for more. The learning that can come from design thinking shouldn’t be left to the realm of professional design. It can, and should, be leveraged daily by non-designers.

It has also changed the way I see most problems. All of these are big gains for me. And who wouldn’t benefit from being more strategic while also being more insightful and empathetic, or more solutions-oriented? Aren’t all of us looking to add value and remove friction for our audiences? Design thinking can help us do this. It’s a new way of seeing your business, your problems, and your customers. It offers you something different, something you may not have run into before. This is the genius of design thinking: It captures the best traits of creatives, innovators, and designers, and it consolidates those traits into a simple strategic framework. It helps us be free to experiment, to consider form and function together, and to iterate without fear. It also involves a little bit of process (which is non-linear by necessity and not too complicated) to help remind us that, no matter what we do, we are in the business of solving each other’s problems, big and small. It also reminds us that in order to do that, we need to understand the human experience, be willing to ideate around deeper need states, and try things out to see what is most effective.

How do I know?

Consider politics.

As someone not trained in the formal aesthetics of design, I use design thinking daily, and I train other non-designers to do so too. Design thinking offers me a new way of working. It has given me a framework to order my thinking and challenge my assumptions.

What mindset can understand that a country would elect a president who ran on a regressive platform immediately following the second term of its most progressive president to date? Design thinking can. One of its core components is integrated

BY SARAH UNGER

thinking, a process that acknowledges that, although two things may be completely contradictory, an optimistic solution can still emerge from them.

dalliances, pushing me to experiment and find what worked best for me. And if something didn’t work out? I was taught to learn from it and try another solution.

Consider the boardroom.

Even consider design thinking itself.

It’s a place where egos tend to thrive on the power they’ve been given access to. But incorporate design thinking – a fairly ego-less system that looks at humans in a 360-degree way – and decisions can be more collaborative and solutions-driven.

There can’t really be design thinking “purists,” since – as is the case with any sort of mindset or philosophy that has been spread across the world – there are many different interpretations and applications for various situations. There’s IDEO’s take on design thinking, Idea Couture’s take, Stanford d.school’s take, and many more. In some ways, interpreting and applying the tenets of design thinking to fit your specific scenario is the most dynamic and functional part of the thought system. Design thinking isn’t process for the sake of process; it’s a flow that demands its own utility and application – otherwise it would be tucked on a shelf with other planning principles. Designers create simple, human solutions for complex problems – brilliantly, in many cases. But they aren’t the only ones who can. We can – and must – learn from their example to work toward more exciting, innovative, and intuitive offerings. Design thinking offers us the opportunity to think in a different way. We should use this to build things we couldn’t have thought of before. ////

Consider entertainment. That’s my world. Empathy for the end user is absolutely critical to the success of an entertainment company’s content and branded experiences. Calling them “end users” really doesn’t articulate the importance of the relationship between company and consumer. As fans, the audience drives the conversation and adoption that makes or breaks a product, its relevance, and its long-term success. PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Design

Consider how parents raise their children. As the child of two graphic designers, I was consistently impressed by my parents’ curiosity about the world at large. They would often pull out a reference from A in a conversation about B, or relate a Harvard Business Review case study to my grade-school social

Sarah Unger is Vice President, marketing strategy, trends, and insights at Viacom.

Ian Spalter: Insights From Instagram’s Head of Design

This interview originally appeared on techcrunch.com, and was conducted by Jared Erondu and Bobby Ghoshal, the hosts of High Resolution. This is an abridged version of the original interview. Ian Spalter, the current Head of Design at Instagram, has been living and breathing

design for years, making his way around both the client-side and agency world and contributing to creative solutions for some of the most significant design problems to date. A former design leader for YouTube, Foursquare, and Nike+ Fuelband and Running, Spalter has a wealth of experience across a variety of industries. This diverse experience has given Spalter

unparalleled insight into the key differences between the two environments, including the pros and cons of working on each side. Here, Spalter illuminates some of those differences for young designers looking to start their careers or change directions. He also describes some of the behavior-centric work he’s done for Instagram and Nike+ Fuelband, and paints a picture of his beliefs regarding the ideal designer skillset.

PHOTO: CHRISTOPHE WU

B Y TAY LO R D E N N IS

What’s one thing about design that’s clear to you, but that you don’t think is as clear to other people? To me, the way you structure your company is equal to or more important than any sort of process or talent when it comes to the quality of output. So, where does design sit within your organization? Is it something that’s equal to technology, engineering, and product, or is it something that sits under those functions? How do you incentivize and reward people? Do you reward based off of the amount of work or how quickly it’s done, or do you actually reward people based on a [measurement of] the quality of what gets out there? There are all of these other things that you don’t usually learn in design school – everything that happens before what we consider to be a part of the normal design process – that I think have a huge impact on the quality of work that comes out. How is the design team structured and organized at Instagram? It’s kind of a generalist pool of designers. They spend a lot of their time working either in an environment like Sketch, doing a layout piece, or actually working in a prototype environment, like Origami Studio. Each designer is usually dedicated to a particular pillar or product area, be it creating content for Instagram, like Stories, or working on our business platform side. There is a whole suite of tools that we offer for businesses, and we have designers focused on them. Our research is similar as well; it focuses on a particular pillar so that we have good, healthy collaboration between product engineering, design, research, content strategies, and other pieces.

but that need was just the starting point. You can’t graft a new organ to this surface and ecosystem and just expect it to work. That almost always fails. You have to really get into the details of how you make that integration happen. We had a tremendous amount of work to do to get those details right in order for the feature to be successful, and the goal was for it to feel like something that had always belonged there. And if you weren’t ready to use it, you didn’t have to.

How did your team come to the decision to create the Stories function? We always start with problems. The problem we were trying to solve with this was the overall quality bar. We found that people felt pressure to only ever post the best photo on Instagram, so we wanted to loosen that up and to make users feel like they could share whatever they want, as often they would want. That was what we were trying to crack. We actually did not start with the stories format or anything. We looked at it from a lot of different angles, but we really just focused on the question, “How do we allow you to feel comfortable with sharing whatever you want to share, whenever you want to share it?” We eventually landed on the format because it did solve a lot of those problems,

Aside from the Stories feature, a lot of change has happened with Instagram lately. There has been a lot innovation in a very short period of time. What was the force behind all of this change? There were a couple things. I think the company got to a place of maturity where we could do more than one thing at once, and there was a recognition that we could do more and that we needed to evolve. Making the commitment to change something was fundamental. Redesigning the app icon gave us the confidence to say, “Okay, well what else can we push on?” That is the number one rule: You have to continue to evolve. I think what allowed us to do it well was that we picked the right problems to focus on and we defined them really well. From a planning standpoint, we

made sure that we were not taking on too much at once. Sometimes, when you tie too many things together, you cannot really execute on anything well. Once we launched Stories, there was a lot that could follow behind it, and we had the momentum to keep it going. Before you joined Instagram, you had a chance at R/GA to work on what may be the first truly consumerized, commercialized wearable, the Nike+ FuelBand. How did you approach that project? Before we had done FuelBand, Nike+ had already been there. When I came in, we had done a redesign of the web property, and then we actually took Nike+ Running and made it a complete experience using a GPS chip in phones. The whole Nike+ Running experience was a good precursor because we learned about what it means when you can track your data and have social experiences with that. How does it change your behavior? What’s important about that? So it was kind of a good learning ground to take to the FuelBand world, which is a lot more about what we call “the everyday athlete.” There is a lot of learning there, thinking about how this product fits into someone’s day and what it takes to

// Storytelling – at least, when you’re presenting a design – is how you’re framing up the work and configuring your audience to evaluate what you’re about to show them. //

motivate people. Having a goal sounds obvious now, but having a goal that you’re looking at everyday matters a lot. A lot of R/GA’s contributions were in the UI of the mobile app, but they also considered that longitudinal experience. One of the principles that we had, which became my sort of a mantra, was “phone, keys, wallet, FuelBand.” This device is another thing you have to carry with you, so how do we make sure that you want to? We had to think about what it would take for this to be a desirable thing, because at that point, it was kind of like a scarlet letter to wear a pedometer. It was something your doctor might make you wear or a reminder that you were overweight as opposed to something that you actually wanted to wear. What are some of the opportunity costs to starting out your career in an agency versus starting client-side or with a startup? We have to take into account the context of the time. When I started, there weren’t a lot of design opportunities within software. Because design practice within software organizations is a bit more mature now, you can actually have a full career working within that industry – whether it’s in the startup world or in larger technical companies.

I think the opportunity cost of starting on the agency side is that it is different to be in an environment where the ideas matter more than their execution, delivery, and impact. The types of people that you collaborate with are different, and how you measure whether something is a good piece of work is very different between the worlds. A good piece of work in the agency world might be something the client really liked or something that sold through work and attracted new business, whereas a good piece of work at Instagram might be something that’s smaller but has a great material impact on the business. As the landscape and responsibilities with design continue to evolve, what are some changes that you think will need to happen in the agency world? I think agencies are getting smaller and more nimble. Having real technical prowess is a baseline for all agencies at this time. One good thing is that being able to tell great stories is becoming more important. It’s just a different format. Agencies are becoming more agile and having less overhead, and every agency, if they have a small specialty, is trying to branch into something else. But there’s always going to be a role for people who are great storytellers and great communicators, as well as for people who are specialists in certain domains of graphic art, communications, etc. In-house teams may not be able to support those roles completely. I think there will be room for smaller boutique shops that are just killers in a certain area, but I think larger agencies will struggle a little bit. What do you mean when you say “storytelling”? What is storytelling to you when it comes to design? To me, every story has an arc. There’s some setup, a crisis, and some sort of resolution. Storytelling – at least, when you’re presenting a design – is how you’re framing up the work and configuring your audience to evaluate what you’re about to show them. It’s kind of the moment of crisis when you actually show the work. If you skip the storytelling aspect and just show the work, your client won’t know how to evaluate it. You need to make that audience want to come along that journey. From there, they’ll be better set up to evaluate the work in the way you want them to. The resolution, of course, is that you get the feedback or decision you were looking for.

What qualities do you look for in a s trong designer? At Instagram, we look for product sense. Product thinking means that before you even get down to pixels, you really break down the given problem, and then consider how you will go about solving that from a product lens. That’s key to having a larger impact; it’s key to going from zero to one on something and to having the conversations you need to have with fairly bright product managers and engineers. I think having a great sense of craft and really caring about the details is important, but I think you need to have a good balance between solving a problem and solving it extremely well. You should have the ability to adapt to a prototyping culture. Self-awareness is also a big one, which kind of goes back to culture. You should know where you are, where you’re going, where you’re weak, and what you’re trying to build. When you are the only designer in a company, how do you convince the business of the value of design? You leave. That is a great answer. In lieu of that – because you might need a job – I think that you should be well versed in the business problems. If you are the only designer, you are not just a designer – you’re you. Don’t just come back to, “I just do the layout, I just copy in images, or I just design the UI,” but really get in there and meet with the people that are thinking about the business. That should allow you to find new opportunities to add value or insert design into places where folks may not expect it to add value. Can you tell us anything about what Instagram will be taking on next? We are very interested in helping people express themselves. We feel like what’s most important is that the connection gets made between people. If I share something with you, it shouldn’t have an equality bar, but it should create a moment between us; there is some sort of understanding with us, and our relationships are actually stronger as a result. That’s what we are optimizing for. We want to give users a palate to work with to express what they’re feeling at any given moment. We’re even interested in products that are already out there, like Live, that give you that kind of real-time kind of connection. We are excited about that world. //// Taylor Dennis is an editor at Idea Couture.

SERVICE DESIGN WEEK

OPTIMIZING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE THROUGH HOLISTIC SERVICE DESIGN NOVEMBER 6-9, 2017 | BOSTON LEARN MORE & REGISTER ► WWW.SERVICEDESIGNWEEKUSA.COM The marketplace is full of misconceptions around service design, experience design and the approaches/tools available to analyze and optimize value exchange. At Service Design Week, we seek to strip away any fluff, examining service design methods and processes at their core, and unpack the practical tools and skill-sets, hard and soft, needed for this way of working.

The Future of Biodesign: Prosthetics, Apples, and Asparagus

Ask most people what the future of biodesign and human engineering looks like, and – if they have any idea what you’re going on about – they could very well give you a Blade Runner-esque answer: man creates machine, man becomes machine, machine becomes man (sometimes followed by the less popular machine kills man). But biodesign and bioengineering are still in their infancy, and it doesn’t look like we’re

quite ready to start designing our perfect companions (or overlords) just yet. Notwithstanding Hollywood tropes, our accomplishments in health innovation, from cochlear implants to bionic prototypes, are impressive. However, they have proven to be expensive and difficult to develop, design, market, and sell. Thankfully, there are some biohackers, designers, scientists, and entrepreneurs who are actively challenging and redefining the current paradigm.

PHOTO: JOHNS HOPKINS APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY

B Y N I C C O N N O L LY

PHOTO: MATT BENSON

“The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.” – Isaac Asimov

Prosthetics, Biohackers, and Your Local Grocer The prosthetics industry has changed dramatically since its inception some millennia ago, when ancient Egyptians first fashioned wooden toes as walking aids. Now, entrepreneurs, health innovators, and members of the science community regularly announce new biomedical advances. With these advances, they are laying the groundwork for what was once the stuff of Hollywood legend: human augmentation. Neurally-controlled bionic arms, 3D-printed robotic hands, and motorized feet will (hopefully) do more in the future than simply help you update your Instagram feed. Some of Silicon Valley’s foremost thinkers and investors are actively looking to increase human cognitive powers through brain implants and human-computer linking. Billionaire Elon Musk is one of many making moves in this space, and he has openly stated that he believes that we will need to link future human augmentation devices with AI (think “man becomes machine”) in order to ensure a good future for humanity. But the barriers to entry for those needing these revolutionary products are still very real. Prosthetic limbs are prohibitively expensive – one limb can cost tens of thousands of dollars – they are not widely accessible, and they are made from advanced biomaterials foreign to human biology. But who says cosmetic prosthetics – an ear, for example – should be cost prohibitive? And who says they should be designed from plastics? Working off parallel innovations in robotics, AR, and machine learning, a new generation of biohackers and designers are working toward finding solutions to these problems that are grounded in innovation and design. Often working not for some tech juggernaut but in labs at the world’s leading academic institutions, the new vanguard is blurring the lines between academic research and technology development. Applying principles and methodologies traditionally preferred in startup environments, these innovators conduct faster research that’s driven by hypothesis testing and iterative release cycles. And they are starting to get noticed. Thanks to the research being conducted, the future of biodesign may lie not in a plastic or prosthetic lab, nor in a Hollywood studio, but in an orchard, at your local grocer, or even in your vegetable crisper. There are some who believe prosthetics

should be designed from expensive plastics and cost what the market is willing to bear, and then there are those who think they should be designed from materials that are far lower cost – like apples. Dr. Andrew Pelling, physicist, biologist, entrepreneur, and TED Senior Fellow, is one of a few individuals leading a paradigm shift toward creating affordable and accessible prosthetics through design. The Pelling Lab for Biophysical Manipulation successfully hacked a McIntosh apple and grew it into an early prototype for a prosthetic ear. The team washed and removed all apple cells from an apple slice, grew new human cells on the leftover cellulose structure, known as a “scaffold,” and designed a cosmetic prosthetic by sculpting the scaffold into an ear. After completing a trial with mice, Pelling showed that this structure could be biocompatible. The mice’s bodies had little reaction to the apple implant – and in some cases they even grew blood vessels that flowed into the implant. Pelling and his team haven’t stopped at apples and ears; they are now looking at other sections of the produce aisle. Asparagus, for example, presents an interesting opportunity, as it has threedimensional, vein-like tubes running alongside its stalk, structures that mirror those found in human spinal nerves. While this research and the prototypes developed by Pelling’s lab are not yet available to consumers, the imagination of other scientists has certainly been piqued, allowing them to leap to solutions not yet reasoned – one can imagine much to Isaac Asimov’s joy. Once reason catches up to imagination, it’s not impossible to think that Pelling’s process could be used for both aesthetic and functional purposes, to beautify or repair body parts. The future of biodesign could very well be organic, delicious, and available at your local grocer. Are you ready for affordable grow-it-yourself prosthetics?

Are You Looking for Inspiration in the Right Places? As design innovation continues to disrupt the healthcare space, allowing for increasingly cost-effective alternatives to traditional biomaterials, business leaders need to be on the lookout for individuals challenging conventional thinking if they are to remain relevant. New design techniques, such as the one being explored by Pelling, should not be seen as a challenge to traditional thinking, but rather

as an opportunity for true innovation. Identifying and aligning with individuals leveraging their imagination to leap “to solutions where reason can follow only slowly” will help current market leaders navigate the tumultuous waters of innovation by building transformative solutions that deliver value through design.

Food for Thought / Tinker Hatfield, of Nike fame, drew from his architectural background in order to innovate within shoe design. The Nike Air Max, which Tinker designed in the mid-1980s, was inspired by the Pompidou Centre in Paris and its exposed skeleton. / Architect Jørn Utzon drew inspiration from nature for his most notable design, the Sydney Opera House. Its design was inspired by the act of peeling an orange – and, if brought together, the building’s 14 segments form a perfect sphere. Augmented biology might be closer than we think, thanks to design solutions inspired by unlikely sources. Where are you looking for design innovation? //// Nic Connolly is a project manager at Idea Couture.

Democratizing Innovation:

Tools That Shaped History and Culture: From Prehistoric African Stone Tools to 21st-Century Global Capitalism

Everyone is a designer; design is what makes us human.

BY M ARC PAULSEN

Designing the Toolbox for the Global Society

It’s been three years since I moved to London. However, only a few weeks ago, I made my first visit to the British Museum – another thing to tick off the almost inexhaustible list of things to do in Europe’s megacity. The oldest human-made artifact on display in the museum is a two-million-yearold chopping stone from Tanzania. Seeing it made me think of MIT Press’s Design Thinking, Design Theory, a book series edited by Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman. These books make an interesting attempt at defining the overall practice of design as the “making of things to serve a useful goal, making tools.” The museum’s Tanzanian chopping stone is a lot more significant than you might initially think: It’s a relic of the beginnings of the practice of design. Humans have been creating tools, such as the chopping stone, since before the early Stone Age. Every person practices design to some extent; we are all design practitioners. Yet, most of us never think about how we go about it, or even about how we arrive at design decisions. When we make or improve tools to solve problems, we are confronted with exactly what makes us human in the first place. Employees are involved in enhancing or creating something new – whether that means organizing an interior space or garden, improving a company’s internal processes, or thinking about ways to create new revenue streams – and are paid to make these design decisions on a daily basis. Even as citizens, we are all designers, as voting allows us to help “design” how our country should be organized.

Historically, humans have designed tools to help them cope with or improve upon their immediate circumstances. Widely adopted tools have been stored in something like “community toolboxes,” where tools become the standard on a local, national, or even global level. Thanks to these toolboxes, tools that helped humans organize themselves and increase productivity – especially in agriculture – led to the rise of modern civilizations. These widely adopted or enforced tools became, and continue to serve as, the standards that significantly shape our societies and cultures. Over the years, many empires have risen – and fallen – after expanding beyond their borders and forcing their toolboxes on other cultures. For example, around 600 BC, Persia emerged as the world’s first cross-cultural empire, implementing a toolbox consisting of an official language, a road network, and a postal system, among other innovations. Power in such empires was usually centralized, and important design decisions were made by only a privileged few. But every empire of this kind ultimately collapsed. Could this perhaps be because they failed to design and employ the right tools? This brings us back to where I am now: London. Apart from some impressive palace buildings and monuments reminding us of the city’s “glorious” past, London’s influence and power have largely faded. From the 17th century to the 20th century, the United Kingdom slowly adopted – or, arguably, was forced to adopt – more democratic tools of governing. These systemic tools, such as democracy and capitalism, provided a nurturing environment for rapid innovation. With the subsequent invention of important technology, like the train, the status quo of the human experience was challenged. Then, globalization resulted in an extremely interconnected world; different tools from all over the world are now funneling into one single universal repository, and vast parts of the world now run on very similar tools. The world has changed significantly – and a globalized world is here to stay.

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Are We Adopting the Right Tools? Goals in this globalized world should not only be set on a regional scale, but should also be aligned in order to tackle global issues (e.g. climate change, migration, and security). Today, digital technologies are developing exponentially, and cultures and societies also seem to be evolving more quickly. This means that the adaptability of a tool is more crucial than ever. Are we currently applying the right tools that enable us to cope with the challenges lying ahead? What kind of toolbox is needed to enable us to transition to a more sustainable society, economy, and environment? When considering these tools at a political level, we can see a shift has occurred in many Westernized countries, from localized communities, to centralized power regimes, to decentralized decision-making paradigms. Ordinary citizens are now more empowered and can participate in the design choices affecting the political decision-making process. Policies are created in a more participatory way, and nationally deployed toolboxes are created more collaboratively. When it comes to retail, global capitalism and the corporate competition game have largely taken over, with the shopping choices we make as consumers now having the potential to influence corporate design decisions. Despite the fact that potential consumers have to play a larger role, most corporate design choices are still being made by a select few. Income inequality is on the rise, and only a handful of people make up the corporate elite. This problem continues to escalate as large companies grow and seek new ways of increasing revenue. Important design decisions are being made by only a few and are trickling from the top down – just as they did in the Persian Empire, and in other empires that followed. On one hand, it seems that modern society incentivizes progression and innovation, but on the other hand, big companies are once again forcing their tools upon everyday citizens. This is called the network effect. Oftentimes, it leaves regular people with no choice but to adopt the tools provided by corporations, whose main objectives are to increase shareholder value and respond to the pressure of expected growth. Is this what we, the consumers, really want? Further, since the increased deregulation of the economy, which began in the 60s and continued into the 70s and 80s, the market has increasingly dictated the rules, taking power away from citizens. Mysterious forces and institutions have emerged, with many corporations ultimately becoming more powerful than nations. A recent article in The Washington Post by Thomas Heath pointed out that Apple’s revenue exceeds the GDP of Finland and Jamaica combined. Meanwhile, with more than two billion active accounts, Facebook has more members than there are citizens in China and Europe. As the power balance between countries and corporations continues to shift, we must renegotiate how we make the decisions that influence our culture and society on such a large scale.

Co-Designing Tools Fit for the Future Regulatory frameworks are rapidly changing in response to developing technologies and value chains, and the growing intangibility of tools and overall value creation is posing a huge challenge. The public needs to have a say – especially in a time where the most lucrative commodity is no longer oil, but data, and important decisions are on the verge of being outsourced to algorithms. We, the consumers, must radically shift our mindset. Words like “users,” “customers,” “clients,” or “counterparts” should be replaced with words such as “members,” “partners,” “friends,” or “communities” – or simply “people.” In the digital era, it’s the people who create the value – and we must become more conscious as design practitioners. As a first step, we should acknowledge that all of us – including traditionally marginalized groups and minorities – are designers, and we all ultimately have the power to shape the tools of our society. We have to start reflecting on how we make design decisions, and we must make our decision-making tools increasingly agile and responsive to ensure they can continually fulfill a useful purpose. All tools have an expiry date; they must be able to adjust to the ever-changing circumstances and needs of people. By making design processes more human-centered, participatory, and inclusive – and by democratizing innovation and design in general, both on a political and corporate level – we will be able to create tools that better serve our goals and ultimately lead the way to a more sustainable future. This begins with making our complex processes, systems, and value creation chains more tangible and transparent through a multidisciplinary and creative sense-making approach. It’s time for global corporate key decision makers to start not only designing for more addictive customer experiences, increased operational efficiency, revenue, and shareholder value, but also to begin democratizing decision making and including their customer bases in the design process. This would result in better business models, products, and services, as well as a more sustainable outlook for our planet. //// Marc Paulsen is a service designer at Idea Couture.

Toronto, 15-17 November 2017

Design Through Context

wishes, motivations, and experiences of everyday people. This human-centric method helps us feel empathy for end users and also inspires better design solutions. To understand context, we need to understand humans. And if we want to do that, we need to understand ethnography. Ethnography seeks to understand human behavior and culture by engaging with people, wherever they are and in whatever they are doing. This method can help identify unarticulated and unmet customer needs in order to help establish a frame of reference. There are many different ethnographic tools, including cultural probes, visual collages, co-creation of mini product models, and video probes. All materials must be ambiguous and neutral – that is, they must not influence participants’ behavior. To mitigate the risk of creating a bias, researchers must allow participants to act freely.

Where Do We Start?

What Is Good Design? Why do we design, and what is “good design”? What criteria can we use to measure a design’s quality? And how can we go beyond visual elegance, thoughtful positioning, and tasteful art to ensure the user sees what we see? We often ask questions like this, but rarely do we explore them in depth. We know that integrated design should be pleasing to the eye, easy to use, and should have a shallow learning curve. By these standards, there is really no such thing as “good” or “bad” design – unless, perhaps, there are specialized skills to consider. The reality is that human nature isn’t as

natural and simple as designers would like it to be. Designing for the perfect customer archetype is not possible. Customers are imperfect, a fact that good design must reflect by addressing the full context of a given design problem. Good design needs to be connected to the elements of form, function, and meaning. Products and experiences must be realized not only through mass manufacturing, but also with respect for the human, technical, ecological, and economic constraints around the user experience. Users’ perception of a product or service is dependent on the context in which they use it, meaning that the line drawn between good and bad design depends on how the context is mapped – context is everything.

Good Design Starts With Understanding Context Only when we understand the context informing a design’s purpose – including the emotions and needs of users – can we pursue good design. To develop this understanding, we must ask the question: “How do we figure out the context?” This is context mapping. Context mapping, a design thinking approach developed by Delft University of Technology professors Froukje Sleeswijk Visser and Pieter Jan Stappers, involves using people’s everyday experiences to inform and inspire one’s own creative design process. Here, users and designers must work together to explore the needs,

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

BY JARAAD MOOTEE

Before context mapping is possible, context framing must be done. Only with proper framing can we apply the right set of lenses and the proper scope when looking at a problem. First, we require a testable hypothesis. We can then perform an activity from which to derive results, whether those inform the validity of the hypothesis or, perhaps, the key drivers reinforcing our original thought. In either case, framing the problem the right way can be the difference between finding insights that are not actionable and developing real solutions. Take, for example, one of the fathers of operational research, Abraham Wald. During World War II, the US Navy was studying bullet holes and damage done to returning US aircraft to determine how best to armor their planes. Initially, the researchers identified the areas of the planes that were hit most frequently as the most in need of armor. But Wald looked at the problem differently. He realized that the planes they were collecting the data from were the ones that returned home – in other words, these planes had likely incurred the least fatal damage. So Wald reframed the problem. Rather than focusing on where the returning planes were hit, he proposed looking at places with no damage. If those areas were hit, the pilot never made it home. Once we understand how to look at a problem, we can begin pre-mapping.

Context Mapping, Pre-Mapping, and Generative Tools Pre-mapping involves using rapid early-stage ethnography to establish which baseline insight to begin with. The aim of rapid ethnography is to document a user’s context in as much detail as possible, which helps to ensure that all insights are relevant and can be linked to context. This provides input for context mapping, where the objective is to use generative tools and observations of the user’s experience to come up with new solutions. Practitioners use different generative tools to meet various business and design needs. When considering which tools to use, we must consider the users’ degree of sophistication and literacy, specialist user knowledge, and privacy concerns. Some commonly used tools include: / Life Caches: This includes blogs, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. You can tell a lot about a person based on what they like to talk about and the way they present it. Life caches are great pre-mapping generative tools that can help us understand the contexts around a user’s attitudes, beliefs, and personality, providing us with a baseline before we move into exploring the future. / Show and Tell: This involves the user presenting one or more meaningful object(s) and describing it through stories, evoked emotions, personal associations, and connected experiences. Having a physical medium gives the user something tangible to inspire or comfort them as they explore their associations. / Immersion Days: This involves diving into the user’s lifestyle, including things like their workplace, hobbies, and how they go about their day. Immersion days facilitate a greater depth of empathy, allowing the researcher to experience what it’s like to walk in the user’s shoes. / Shopping Trips: Shopping trips with the user help the researcher explore the user’s decisionmaking process, including how they approach purchases, comparative analysis, and opportunity cost. This involves shopping with the user and encouraging them to discuss their thought process about what they are choosing to buy, why they need it, and what it reminds them of. The researcher should step back and avoid guiding the conversation as much as possible. / Digital Journaling: Digital journaling is like writing in a diary. The user agrees to record, through the medium of their choice, their thoughts, feelings, complaints, and hopes around an experience. A digital journal can include words, pictures, selfies, personal videos, or other media taken throughout an experience. By understanding context through ethnography, we can understand “good design.” On a surface level, if design is not grounded in its user’s specific context and required functionality, it can be considered “bad” design. However, by applying the right lens to “bad” design” and finding a context in which it works well, it becomes clear that this label is inaccurate. Good design is the result of proper context framing and context mapping. If mapping is done correctly and the design faithfully delivers the value proposition and a solution for the identified user problem, it should be considered good design. Perhaps how it looks matters a little less. //// Jaraad Mootee is a technology analyst at Idea Couture.

Through a Transhuman Lens An Interview with Photographer David Vintiner

To me, David Vintiner seems like the kind of guy who got into photography because he was curious about the world, and sticking a camera in front of fascinating people gave him an excuse to get to know more about them. Scrolling through his website, his projects scream of a mind that is hungry to uncover the tales of unique individuals around the world. Whether it’s moss-covered men, memory champions, modern day religious pilgrimages, or military training exercises, David’s work digs deeply into the human stories behind people in extraordinary or unnatural settings. It therefore came as no surprise when some of David’s latest work looked at the extremes of human-technology evolution. After working for two years on Transhuman, and with everything he’s learned, he has even begun to question if Transhuman is the right title. Regardless of the title, however, the work speaks loudly – even though David claims he’s only about halfway through what he hopes to accomplish. And while I was inspired by his photographs and was able to learn a lot simply by scrolling through the gallery, what I really wanted to know was what his mind had captured beyond the lens. So, as we worked through the typical technical issues of a transatlantic video conference, I began to probe him about what lies beyond the snapshot.

What originally attracted you to the transhumanist movement? The project is a collaboration with an art director named Gemma Fletcher; it was her idea. She had been to a meetup of London futurists and thought this would be a cool photography project. We are always talking about ideas for work, and she told me about this group of people and we went from there. I think Neil Harbisson was one of the first people we photographed, and after that we just started to dig deeper and deeper into the community. It started from a chance conversation, really. Did you have any previous knowledge or experience with transhumanism? No, I didn’t have a clue and, at the time, I don’t think most people did either. When I tell people about this project for the first time, they’re usually gobsmacked and have never heard of anything like it. Surprisingly though, it is getting a lot more press coverage lately as a movement – in magazines, news, and on the web. What was your goal for this project? Was there something you hoped to communicate, or did you just want to share these people’s experiences? That’s a complicated question. When we initially started, much like a lot of my personal work, I tried to look for something slightly unusual, slightly hidden. But now, I’ve become a bit obsessed with seeing more about how people are embracing technology. I think that these stories are fascinating and the transhuman community is in a period when a lot of the things these people are doing seem very sci-fi and unbelievable. People are taking significant leaps forward. We’re at a pivotal moment in the movement, and I think that should be shared.

PHOTO: DAVID VINTINER

BY SHANE SAUNDERSON

// Outside of those who turn to transhumanism for medical purposes, you get the complete eccentrics. They’re trying to expand the capabilities of what the human body can do. //

PHOTO: DAVID VINTINER

You mentioned that many of these people have fascinating stories. Are you seeing common themes around why people are doing this? Yes. Definitely. I suppose the biggest overarching theme would be that all of these people are not scared of technology; they have thoroughly embraced technology and anything that it can throw at them. They’ll just take it and run with it. From there, it breaks down into a lot of sub-sections. There are some people looking to technology for medical reasons for things like exoskeletons, brain-controlled bionic limbs, and artificial sight and sound for the deaf and blind. I’m sometimes surprised people have chosen to do them, but they have helped them wonderfully. What’s interesting is that amputees and people using bionic limbs and such talk about their previous challenges. Before, when they had an old clunky prosthetic, people would treat them with sympathy or pity. But now, someone like James Young has a high-tech bionic arm, and people tell him it’s amazing. So, after a horrible accident, his self-esteem is improved because he’s found something really positive. Outside of those who turn to transhumanism for medical purposes, you get the complete eccentrics. They’re trying to expand the capabilities of what the human body can do, and some people are very playful with that. I don’t think many have a serious intention for the types of experiments they are playing with, but it’s just a bit of fun for them and there’s definitely some humor in it too. What about the people who are going beyond fun or restoring functionality, and into body enhancements or superhumanism? I haven’t had many in-depth conversations along those lines, but I have started to scratch the surface of the theoretical endgame of any of this: brain uploading, cryogenics, and life extension – all the really weird stuff. For some, transhumanism means augmenting or enhancing existing senses – like creating ultrasonic hearing or being able to see UV light – and for others, this could mean creating entirely new senses – such as detecting earthquakes or electromagnetic fields. But not everyone we talked to identified with that kind of thing.

That’s why I didn’t want everyone in the project to necessarily be called transhumanists, because a lot of people dissociate from those at the far end of the spectrum. Through your work on this project so far, what has surprised you the most? Meeting cyborgs, meeting people with extra senses… that’s all very surprising. I’m still getting used to the idea. I just read a book called To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell. He talks a lot about brain uploading, AI, and transforming human brains into supercomputers. For me, it was very surprising to learn that Google and other companies are working on this kind of thing and it’s all completely unregulated. There’s a lot of pretty frightening stuff going on right now that’s completely unchecked. Nick Bostrom at Oxford talks about the peak of AI, a tipping point where AIs become more intelligent than humans, and are able to self-replicate. The fact that you’ve got companies like Google and many others with all the money in the world working on these types of projects… I think that’s been the biggest surprise. Nobody’s watching that closely. If someone had told me about this a year ago, I would have thought it was complete nonsense. However, seeing what’s possible now, knowing the money that is being thrown at these types of projects, I’m still a bit amazed at how unregulated it all is. What comes next for the project? In the early days, we were trying to figure out exactly what we had. Gemma and I spent a lot of time researching, constantly looking for leads and seeing if we could find somebody who was relevant or might be interesting. And then it just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. I think having a book and an exhibition would be the end goal and I’m aiming for about 80 subjects. We’ve been going for about two years now, and I think it’ll take another two years. It’s big. It’s global. //// David Vintiner is an award-winning photographer based in the UK. Shane Saunderson is VP, IC/ things at Idea Couture.

SERVICE DESIGN IS HAVING A MOMENT.

ive years ago, the term did not exist outside of a small circle of customer experience practitioners. But the world has moved on from the 20th century view of the customer. Rather than being the last stop on the operational journey, the customer is now beginning to occupy a spot at the center of the corporate universe.

Why is this happening? We can certainly thank the rise of digital transformation for providing new experience platforms in the online space and forcing traditional platforms to reconsider the nature of their business. As we become more and more immersed in digital channels, we are being trained to pay much closer attention to the quality of the experience. That is causing us to view everything as an experience, including tangible products. We have also seen customer empowerment move in lockstep with increased digital disruption. With this shift in the balance of power from seller to buyer, sellers suddenly need to be much more attuned to the quality of the interactions they create, because defection is now just a click away; the barriers to exit have evaporated. As technology becomes increasingly influential in our daily lives, we become conditioned to expect greater agency, even as we surrender more and more of our personal identities to get it. This exchange of autonomy for agency creates a kind of free-floating anxiety and a sense of loss and dislocation. It sets up a tension between technology and humanity, making a human-centered approach to experience design increasingly important to anyone in the service business.

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The practice of human-centered service design has begun to have a very positive impact. According to recent research published by the Design Management Institute, design-driven companies have maintained a significant stock market advantage, outperforming the S&P by 228% over the last 10 years. The study goes on to say that “the most innovative companies in the world have one thing in common: they use design as an integrative resource to innovate more efficiently and more successfully.” Service design can certainly take its share of the credit. To explore its increasing importance and touch on its future, MISC spoke with four leaders in the field. We’ve engaged service design leaders from the telecom, travel, insurance, and technology sectors to hear how they and their organizations are making service design a key plank in their strategic platforms. Here’s what they had to say.

How Service Design Can Elevate Consumer and Employee Experience BY—

WILL

NOVOSEDLIK

BLUEPRINTS FOR ENGAGEMENT

75 What kinds of customer experience challenges are particular to the airline industry? Perhaps our greatest challenge is ensuring our customers enjoy a seamless experience at every point of their journey – from arriving at the airport and checking in, to going through security, boarding the plane, and then the flight itself. We work hard to curate the parts of the ourney we control, like check-in, our Clubhouse, and the on-board flight experience. But there are aspects of the journey – like going through security – that are out of our control and that our customers find stressful. We are always challenging ourselves to e plore how we can make the e perience better for our customers. We work really closely with the airport authorities to push the boundaries with what we can o er. or e ample, we are the only airline to o er drive thru check in and a private security channel at London Heathrow, which allows our Upper Class customers to go from limo to lounge in ust minutes. We also had the opportunity recently to redesign our atwick check in and Clubhouse areas to both embody our brand personality and simplify the travel experience. Are there any challenges that are particular to Virgin Atlantic in comparison to other airlines?

MARK ANDERSON EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, VIRGIN ATLANTIC

CUSTOMER

ur customers have very high e pectations of us, so if something doesn’t go to plan, it can cause an even deeper level of frustration than they might have if ying with a di erent airline. We never want to disappoint our customers, but, unfortunately, things do occasionally go wrong. t’s up to us, therefore, to recover the situation quickly with our typical Virgin Atlantic personality and flair so that our customers aren’t disappointed. To what extent is customer experience a strategic priority for your brand? Developing a unique and exciting customer experience is key to our overall business strategy; our customers are truly at the heart of everything we do. This is something that is instilled in the company’s and filters down from our leadership team to all our front-line, customer-facing teams. Our service design is key to offering our customers differentiated and more valuable experiences. It may seem simple, but we know our customers want to get as much rest as possible on overnight ights. herefore, we have adapted and shortened our meal service so our customers can get straight to sleep. On day ights, however, we know our customers love to interact with our cabin crew. So we have developed a restaurant-style meal service where each course is served in turn, allowing our crew to be visible and interact with travelers.

OUR SERVICE DESIGN IS Mark Anderson is responsible for all customer-facing teams, including Customer Experience Design, Contact Centers, Airports, Clubhouses, In-Flight Services, and Crew. He is a true commercial customer champion, and is passionate about developing people to be their best. He has over 25 years of senior management experience in retail and travel.

KEY TO OFFERING OUR CUSTOMERS DIFFERENTIATED AND MORE VALUABLE EXPERIENCES.

How do you ensure that your customer experience strategy aligns with your brand strategy and overall corporate strategy at Virgin? We feel as though they go hand in hand, and, as a result, o ering a great customer e perience is an integral part of our corporate strategy. By listening intently to what our customers are telling us, we ensure we tailor our customer proposition to deliver what they want. We’re fortunate to have such a strong brand; our customers love to talk about us, and we’re very keen to hear from them directly about their e periences. We use their feedback on a daily basis to help us improve how we deliver our products and services. We also monitor trends so we can ensure we’re providing the great experiences that our customers are telling us they want. How does service design connect customer experience with employee experience at Virgin Atlantic? And how do you measure the success of a service design program? Our people are a key part of the process when we design our customer e perience. We want to ensure it works for our teams as much as it works for our customers. We get feedback on an ongoing basis from both our customers and our people, and we are nimble enough to change things if they’re not working. We use a customer et romoter core to measure our success, and we get monthly scores to get a complete picture on what’s working and what’s not.

How do you think services will be designed in the future? What should organizations be thinking about? We’re constantly looking at how we can tailor e periences further. We’re finding that our customers like to design their own e periences and services, so personalization is becoming more and more critical. One size definitely doesn’t fit all people like to eat at di erent times, watch films at di erent times, and some people like to use technology whereas others like to chat with our crew. We are focused on di erentiating the customer e perience in interesting ways. We have an opportunity to create more airline firsts, especially as we design e periences on our new aircraft which will arrive in . We’re also reviewing customer e perience trends outside of our industry to see how we can adapt, learn, and innovate. here will undoubtedly be significant change, from how customers go through airports to what in ight e periences are available. t’s a very exciting time.

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JUDY MELLETT DIRECTOR, SERVICE DESIGN, TELUS COMMUNICATIONS

INNOVATION,

What was the impetus behind establishing a service design practice at TELUS? In 2007, we realized the only way to differentiate ourselves was was not to tout the latest phone or plan, but to focus on customer e perience. We recogni ed our customer was our greatest asset, and the only real source of differentiation we have left. The internal climate was also right for us at that point, because if the organi ational mindset is not there, you can’t sell it in.

AND

When we originally pitched service design, we talked about the fact that there is a disciplined, rigorous process and a defined set of tools for it. The climate was right, we had the right tools, and so we were ready to bring adoption. But we still needed to start small, so we picked some pilot pro ects like oaming, for instance as a starting point. We began by focusing on experiences that were centered on a specific client journey or touchpoint.

STRATEGY

Has that approach changed since you began? Are you more strategic about it now?

PHOTO: BRENDAN CHURCH

As Director, Service Design, Innovation, and Strategy at TELUS, Judy Mellett’s current focus centers on engaging in purposeful design and delivering end-to-end service experiences that reinforce TELUS’ brand proposition and sustain customer loyalty. Judy is the founder and leader of TELUS’ internal service design team, which is responsible for projects impacting the organization’s 13 million customers. Judy and her team are passionate advocates for service design and active supporters and members of the Service Design Network.

Over time, you start to see the patterns across different business lines and you start to have a more strategic view. But where does strategy stop and e ecution begin? ven in a pro ect like oaming, where there are very specific financial targets, there is a roadmap. So you can call that kind of work executional, but if you incorporate other insights that you have from solving other similar problems, you can start to build a three-year strategy around it. We know what we need to do in the short term, but we are also getting broader insights that lend more of a strategic context. As a team, we work across many di erent lines of business and there are many common themes emerging from these individual initiatives that enable us to tackle bigger, more strategic problems. It allows us to gain a bigger picture view of the organi ation’s challenges. We also work with individual business owners, so we can offer them more breadth of insight because we have worked across so many silos. In this way, service design can act like a bridge across the silos.

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TO HAVE A LIKEABLE BRAND ONLY GOES SO FAR. YOU NEED TO HAVE THE CHOPS TO DELIVER

PROMISE WILL RING HOLLOW. IT NEEDS TO HAVE TEETH.

WITH

JUDY

MELLETT

How do you bring together your employee experience with your customer experience?

After five years, how broadly is service design understood at TELUS?

We understand that the only way to di erentiate the customer experience is to have your employees on the same path. We have over , employees they are the ones who will deliver the e perience to customers. What are the details around all the interactions they will have, whether they are developing products or dealing directly with complaints? he only pathway is through our employees. hat’s why advocacy is so critical for us. We always say they are ine tricably linked.

t’s growing and it has accelerated, especially in the consumer group. Service design is also getting more credibility from the stakeholders. t’s grown very well, and now it has e tended onto many other areas of the business. We have hit the demand tipping point.

We are among the highest employee engagement scores globally for companies our size and scale. But we need to go beyond just “happy” employees. How do you get your team to advocate authentically as the face of your brand? ur employees are the most important marketing tool we have.

We do a lot of road shows across the organization to showcase the work we have done and bring some awareness of its value to the different businesses at . We have a W board that is managed weekly, we have a process for entertaining new engagements, we have a system for deciding who works on what and what has the priority, we have a list of e ternal providers to partner with. We have had to institute formal processes because we’ve en oyed so much growth. What’s next for service design at TELUS?

Are there any challenges you would say are unique to the telecom business? Any barriers you have that other industries do not? With society’s growing dependence on the internet and the growing need for data and speed, one of the particular challenges is to meet the demands that come with this. The complexities that come with them is a big challenge. We enable access to the internet, and we add lots of services on top of that. And then there are a lot of other providers’ services and products that ride on the back of large capital investments that we’ve made.

OR ELSE THE BRAND

INTERVIEW

I think the challenge is that we have become a critical service for most people. And on the innovation side, maintaining the quality of the network to cope with those demands, and also managing some of the support and costs associated with other vendors’ services are also challenging. We support et i , for e ample, which is riding across our pipes. hen there’s acebook, and napchat, people connecting via wifi he reliability of those connections becomes our responsibility and we need to be mindful of what’s happening across our industry. To have a likeable brand only goes so far. You need to have the chops to deliver or else the brand promise will ring hollow. It needs to have teeth. Reliability is number one. Customers need to feel like the products and services are up to their expectations.

apability building. t’s not all about ust doing the work now; we are a level above that. We believe in it so wholeheartedly, we want the rest of the organization doing it. If it’s ust my team doing it, we create bottlenecks. There are too many projects, so we are starting to identify the strongest candidates in various parts of the business and transferring the skills to them in hopes that they will use them and train their own people. t’s spreading organically. t’s a process that ensures the solutions we have, the marketing messages we send out, and the positions we take are robust enough to keep us on the path to customer-centricity.

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ANDY CARGILE SENIOR DIRECTOR OF USER EXPERIENCE SMART TECHNOLOGIES

What is your background and role at SMART Technologies?

Is there a service design element within the classroom experience?

I was an interaction designer long before they had a word for it, back in the s and s. like to work at the intersection of hardware and software. I was working at various startups doing a lot of interaction design, and was also at Microsoft, doing user research and design. When had an opening, umped at it. We are doing hardware and software across five different platforms.

The service design component comes in the form of a mobile service app we just released for teachers in the classroom. It allows them to control the board while they are away from it. t’s one of our first forays into service design.

SMART has a range of software for teachers that allows them to create whiteboard content that’s interactive and invite students to come up to the board and make their own contributions. ow the product can be experienced on the board itself, and on multiple other devices: tablets, PCs, notebooks, and mobile, which is a key component to our success going forward. So every time you solve a UX problem, you are also solving a CX problem.

ndy argile has over 3 years of experience leading U teams in startups, consultancies, large corporations, and higher education. He currently leads the User Experience team at SMART Technologies, where he and his team are responsible for the user experience across their hardware and software education products that are used by millions of teachers and students worldwide. Prior to SMART, Andy led future research and strategy for aviation at Teague and led the Hardware Design group at Microsoft.

ur sales model is comple and layered. Within , we have a group and they primarily focus on our resellers. We have a whole group focused essentially on the purchaser experience. So how do we support the resellers? How do we support the buyers in a school district, who tend to be pros, technical coordinators, and s? However, my focus is on the end users – the teachers and students. When you’re developing your products, where do you start? I am a strong supporter of really understanding user needs at a primary level. We start with ethnographic research with both students and teachers. We do this through participatory observation in the classroom and individual ethnographies with parents.

We are trying to untether the teacher from the front of the classroom and the board, which is the traditional pedagogical model. If students are working in teams, the teacher can walk around the classroom while the board remains at the front. Teachers can control the content as well as the student devices. They may, for example, want a group to show its work up on the smartboard for the rest of the class to see. They are looking for tools that will allow them the freedom of teaching by walking around. How does your UX reflect what your brand stands for? rom the very beginning, has been about education. t our core, we are about using technology to facilitate teachers and students learning in the classroom. And UX is a key part of that promise.

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83 What are your key customer experience challenges, especially when it comes to digital? Amica takes great pride in its customer service and is nationally recognized as a top performer. My charge is to ensure that we deliver the same high-quality customer experience on our digital platforms that we provide on our other channels. Our customers are accustomed to receiving great service regardless of platform, whether that’s a face to face meeting with an mica representative or a conversation with someone in our call center, or even with snail mail. We need to replicate this e perience in digital.

How are you achieving great customer experiences? n my opinion, it’s an emotional proposition. ur mission statement inspires us to create peace of mind for our clients and build strong customer relationships. We’re e pected to e ceed client e pectations to deliver an e perience that people want to talk about. We want people to say things like, “I had a wonderful conversation with my insurance company. never e pected that. an you imagine?

JILL RASMUSSEN MARKETING OFFICER, DIGITAL EXPERIENCE AMICA INSURANCE

Jill asmussen is a Mar eting f cer in the igital Experience Department at Amica Mutual Insurance Company. She is an accomplished, results-driven insurance technology leader with demonstrated success in creating differentiated experiences for both internal and external users She has a year proven trac record of implementations that have a keen focus on improving customer experience, while decreasing operational expenses and promoting corporate growth. A graduate of The University of Virginia, Jill has attained several insurance and design-related designations, including U, U , , and s nsurance perations

In more traditional channels, our employees have been very successful at building those kinds of relationships, in creating that “wow moment” that gets people talking. ut in digital, it’s hard to develop a sense of trust and to get someone to connect emotionally with an online entity. So we work hard from a design perspective to think about an experience that mimics a personal connection. We want to o er a level of personalization, we want to anticipate customer needs as much as we can, and we want to provide a consultative approach that really exceeds their expectations.

BLUEPRINTS FOR ENGAGEMENT

INTERVIEW

WITH

JILL

RASMUSSEN

What are the challenges that are particular to your industry? he trust factor, suppose. We find customers shopping around and coming to Amica because they were unhappy somewhere else. Whether it’s the rates or the service, they’re looking for an alternative. Personal insurance is tough, because you have no reason to speak with us when things are going well – so we have very little contact. Typically, the only time we hear from a client is when a problem occurs.

GET THE

And how about the obstacles that are particular to Amica specifically?

FUNDAMENTALS RIGHT.

When technological change happens, it’s challenging, especially because the bar we’ve set in traditional channels is already e tremely high. In effect, we have the challenge of maintaining high service standards in the face of technological disruption. How do you align your customer-first culture with your employee experience? ne doesn’t happen without the other. We have a strong corporate culture, a strong hiring program, and great training programs. We treat our employees with respect and recognition, and they, in turn, provide a great customer experience.

HIRE WELL.

How do you determine the success of your customer experiences?

CREATE A SOLID FOUNDATION FOR DEVELOPING THAT MOMENT OF DELIGHT.

t’s a rather di cult thing to do. We’re in the process of defining the right s and are spending more time listening to our customers. We’re also bringing them into the early stages of development to more accurately measure the e ectiveness of our service designs. We have seen an increase in tra c on our website which is a success indicator as well. We also conduct sentiment analyses and surveys and ask for satisfaction scores. But it always comes back to that interesting paradox: People want to buy insurance and then not have to use it or think about it too much. You want to establish trust and build connections with customers, even in times when they may not need you. t’s a uni ue challenge. If you had to advise other organizations embarking on the road to prioritizing customer experience, what would you say? et the fundamentals right. Hire well. reate a solid foundation for developing that moment of delight. Work to surprise customers and to create the emotional connections that get them talking about you. It all comes down to emotions.

BLUEPRINTS FOR ENGAGEMENT

INTERVIEW

WITH

JILL

RASMUSSEN

SERVICE DESIGN: THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT

Whether you are , , or , it should be clear from these conversations that at the end of the day, you are dealing with human beings. You are operating at what could be called “the intersection of empathy and economics.” It is an intersection fraught with the tensions between autonomy and agency, automation and personalization, and, indeed, technology and humanity itself. As such, a degree of emotional intelligence is a core ingredient of any service design innovation. One method for building this sense of emotional intelligence is ethnographic work, like the kind ndy argile of echnologies conducts in the classroom. He works to redefine the classroom experience as educational devices begin and continue to impact the dynamics of teacher-student, student-student, and teacher-parent interactions. ervice design’s strategic importance is demonstrated by udy ellett’s description of how is using it to fuel its competitive advantage as a customer first organi ation, helping them to consistently deliver the lowest customer churn in the industry.

Through these conversations, we also learned that, no matter how well crafted your service design may be, or how empathetic your employees may be toward customers, there are always forces beyond your control that can dampen or even reverse your e orts. s ark nderson of irgin tlantic told us, his team may be able to make your in cabin e perience a delight, but there’s not much an airline can do about the experience of going through security. inally, we got a chance to hear from ill asmussen of mica nsurance about the importance of hiring, onboarding, and training employees in the skills needed to deliver a positive service experience. In her world, a good customer experience requires a positive employee experience. All in all, there seems to be little doubt that as the experience economy grows, the strategic importance of service design will grow with it. ccording to a recent artner roup study, of today’s consumer product investments are being redirected toward customer experience innovation of e ecutives surveyed see improving customer e perience as a top priority and of companies surveyed e pect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience. Long live human-centered service design! ////

Will Novosedlik is AVP, head of growth partnerships at Idea Couture.

A Portal Into the Contextual Ecosystem of Human Experience

Personas are transitional artifacts that allow us to synthesize discovered insights into actionable touchpoints. When implemented, framed, and socialized properly, they provide a means to help both client and consultant teams navigate a smooth transition from discovery to design strategy – all without losing invaluable contextual information. In design, particularly in strategic design, we use personas to expose our clients, and ourselves, to the discoveries our colleagues make in the field about the people we design for. In doing so, we create an entry point to the rich ecosystem of human insights and the contexts they are discovered within – helping us to construct frames for empathy and to align everyone on common objectives. In the early 80s, Alan Cooper developed personas to empathize with and internalize the mindset of people who would eventually use the software he was designing. He was also trying to find better ways to inform and communicate to his clients the human-centered knowledge he had gained from the research he conducted. Today, the clients we work with and the outcomes they expect require the study of complex topics with sufficient depth

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Personas

B Y L E N A B L A C K S T O C K A N D D R. S C O T T P O B I N E R

to warrant collaborating with colleagues from the social sciences. These highly-skilled social scientists help us understand human needs and desires, and they provide us with the behavioral and social drivers required to build a case for challenging convention and introducing innovations that have real and lasting impact. It can be daunting to take in the rich context that is captured by the eyes and ears of experts in-field, so it is important to find a way to define entry points that unlock the potential of anthropological insight. We believe that personas, if framed properly, can be a perfect tool to create these entry points, helping to guide all parties toward a shared understanding and affording a more resolute and efficient path to be forged. Personas should not be seen as a deliverable, but rather as an active tool to keep everyone honest and talking about what satisfies human needs. Frank Long at the National College of Art and Design conducted a study in 2009, titled “Real or Imaginary: The Effectiveness of Using Personas in Product Design,” to explore the value of personas as a design tool. In his paper, Long found that “through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualization stages of the design process.” As Cooper recognized, and Long validated, personas are a valuable communication tool that help to ensure that design outcomes meet the demands of the people for whom they are designed and the contexts in which they are expected to be used. Personas are a portal into the kinds of human experiences that are difficult to appreciate without the thoughtful guidance of an expert. Further, instead of using personas in isolation, they should be an active and evolving component of the user-centered design toolkit, and used alongside tools and methods like scenarios, prototypes, and user tests. As Shlomo Goltz explains in A Closer Look at Personas, when used in concert, these tools help to build empathy, develop focus, communicate and form consensus, make and defend decisions, and measure effectiveness. Personas help to keep everyone involved, honest, and mindful of when they are truly designing for others and when they are just pushing their own biases. Cooper’s work also discussed an important shift that is achieved by using personas. Without them, others in the process talk

about the “end user” without being specific – allowing the term “user” to stretch to fit the situation. Cooper’s approach was to “print out copies of the cast of characters and distribute it at every meeting… Until the user is precisely defined, the programmer can always imagine that he is the user.” In Cooper’s goal-driven process, the goals that we derive from personas are the main component of the whole process. He writes, “Personas are the single most powerful design tool that we use. They are the foundation for all subsequent goaldirected design. Personas allow us to see the scope and nature of the design problem… [They] are the bright light under which we do surgery.” Of course, if we were to look beyond Cooper and Long, there are different opinions on the value and effectiveness of personas. They fall into roughly two camps with equally thoughtful cases: / Those who want to preserve the vast richness and complexity of human insights / Those who are more concerned with focusing those insights, and the context in which they are gathered, only on actionable outcomes

As such, those whose work is closer to tangible outcomes see value in using them as a tool, while those who work at the fuzzy front end of the innovation process tend to question their ability to lead to true human understanding. Indeed, there are good cases to be made in both camps, because, in the last decade, design has found expanded relevance and salience with audiences at, and beyond, the edges of the traditional disciplines that once defined the edges by application (think: architect, graphic designer, planner). As IDEO’s Tim Brown said, “Whenever we do something to improve the state of the world, we’re designing.” So, today the question of who isn’t a designer seems more applicable. The unintended consequence of the “big tent” approach is increasingly diverse teams that struggle to communicate with one another, and – more importantly – with the clients and stakeholders they serve when they try to untangle the complex, sometimes confusing behaviors found in-field. In the white spaces between all these new entrants, we find an opportunity to assert the utility of the humble persona. Not a static and forgettable distillation of insights work, but instead a dynamic tool that can help carry insights from discovery, through design, toward real action.

Here, we present three ways of framing persona usage at these points of entry:

The Observatory Window An observatory persona opens a window onto the rich contextual landscape that is gathered during the discovery phase. In this frame, the persona is defined broadly and placed into a variety of contexts.

Alice’s Looking Glass A looking glass persona challenges us to think beyond the biased or narrow assumptions we tend to have about humans and their needs at various moments along a customer journey. This is done in the hope that beyond those biases lies a willingness to see the human condition with fresh eyes, and a desire to explore new ways of solving problems.

One of the ways in which we can apply the above frames is by designing new modalities for personas. One “magic mirror” approach, for example, uses a voice-only persona narrative to encourage workshop participants to explore human experience through listening and reflection – without the assumptions that come along with a visual experience. The “audio persona” places the human voice at the center, which limits visual bias and distraction and encourages listeners to imagine not only the persona behind the voice, but the person beyond it. Without a visual reference, listeners can focus on the presentation of the persona narrative and fill in the blanks with their own experience and knowledge. This can occur while focusing on clearly defined key characteristics, in order for listeners to be able to avoid falling into the trap of designing for themselves. This tool is designed to incorporate larger audiences, where multiple stakeholders need to be able to experience a persona together and to get them to discuss points that stand out. Our hope is to design different formats for personas that support a multi-modal approach to learning and offer a superior context for memory. In turn, they allow for empathy to take shape. By offering multiple formats of any given persona – such as audio-only, immersive and interactive, film, or social media profiles – we can allow those interacting with the persona to truly internalize human needs, increasing the chances that they will act and design with those needs in mind. When we share personas, we expect people to naturally empathize with others to make these connections – but this is quite a challenge, because finding empathy in an

The Magic Mirror A magic mirror persona is a catalyst for co-creation that demands engagement and discussion. Like all magic mirrors, these personas won’t simply give their insights without taking something in return. It is also possible that the conclusions we draw from them are neither convenient nor comfortable – but this is one of the key values to using a persona as a portal. The inconvenient truth is often the one we are least willing to hear, and, equally often, is the most important.

abstraction is a learned skill that must be nurtured in order to be used effectively. Sometimes the way in which we render personas – whether it's an image we choose, or the prose we use to describe needs – reinforces a priori bias, making it even harder to see past the abstraction. In other cases, we obfuscate a rich human story with data points that essentialize the identity of a person, losing vital context in the process. As a result, instead of personas being leveraged as tools that help us get to the next stage of a project, people start to see a solution, and in doing so, they stop asking questions. This challenge is all the more compounded by the inherent conflict between traditional client education – which can be slow – and the need to help a client toward a real solution as quickly as possible. To confront this challenge, we need to develop methods that reveal tangible insights as we aim to dig deeper into the lives of the people we design for, while simultaneously driving toward actionable solutions through purposeful design artifacts. The next time you find yourself wondering how to untangle the messy reality that we humans create for ourselves, look for an observatory window to look out of, find a looking glass to walk through, or just ask the mirror on the wall: “Who are they, to me?” Make use of your personas and leverage them for what they can be: a design tool and a portal into the contextual ecosystem of human experience. //// Lena Blackstock is a design strategist at Idea Couture. Dr. Scott Pobiner is VP, design strategy at Idea Couture.

FORESIGHT

Foresight: + Houston Preparing

University of Houston College of Technology Foresight Program

Professional Futurists

FORESIGHT CERTIFICATE SEMINAR Jan 15-19, 2018 | Houston Apr 30-May 4, 2018 | Houston TO REGISTER: KWWS ZZZ XK HGX WHFKQRORJ\ GHSDUWPHQWV KGFV FHUWLILFDWHV IRUH

BY PAUL ROWA N

When I first started designing products with Umbra in the 80s, our tools were strictly analog; most of our inspiration came from a small number of European magazines that focused on high-end designer products. We would comb through pages of these magazines, tearing out relevant images and – quite literally – pinning them to a board.

What happens when social media meets design? For starters, designers are acquiring information at a much higher speed than ever before. We don’t have to wait for the latest issue of Dwell to appear in our mailbox anymore. Posts on the most current design trends and innovations are instantly available to all designers, everywhere, in real time. You can even view multiple posts simultaneously with sites like Feedly, which consolidates your favorite blogs into a single feed (my personal favorites include Design Milk, designboom, Dezeen, Sight Unseen, Core77, and Fast Company’s Co.Design).

PHOTO: MARTIN GRANDJEAN

Data-Driven Design in the Era of Pinterest

Today, “pinning” has a slightly different meaning. Pinterest, Instagram, and other creative social media outlets have put a world of inspiration at our fingertips – and this has drastically changed the way we create and consume.

Then there’s the sheer amount of content; as of June 2017, over 91 million Instagram posts had been tagged with #design. With so much product visibility in the palm of their hands, designers have no excuse to be derivative. For every new project, designers can research similar products quickly and comprehensively, giving them more confidence that they are producing original work. Better collaboration is another benefit of these platforms. Eugénie de Loynes, Creative Lead at Umbra, uses Pinterest to research the categories of products she is responsible for producing. She creates boards to share with her design, marketing, and production teams, resulting in a more effective, streamlined, and collaborative process. She cautions, however, that it’s tempting to rely on these platforms entirely: “It can become a distraction. If you don’t have an idea and a vision for your design, you’ll keep checking your boards forever.” Then, of course, we have the consumer. Focus groups can now be entire online communities rather than just a few people around a boardroom table. And the feedback they provide is what’s pushing design forward. As Dr. Sara Diamond, President of OCAD University, explains, the design of the future is data-driven. “Designers now have a direct relationship with consumers. Design research in the past consisted of information gathered about what people would say they do. Designers are now looking at data that tells them what they actually do.” On Pinterest alone, 150 million people (most of whom are consumers) are searching for inspiration every month. This shared online space has had a huge influence on the democratization (or consumerization) of design. Instagram might have started up as a platform to post personal photos, but it has evolved into a multilevel platform. Yes, there are still lots of pictures of brunch, but there is also a huge level of engagement on design-related content. Designers can measure the success of their ideas, prototypes, or products through the number of likes they receive on a post or click-through rates on the link in their bio or “story.” The critique is instant, accurate, and directly from the consumer. On social media, consumers keep up with trends and innovations at a similar pace as manufacturers, and they make their tastes and desires known through what they choose to engage with online. Entire marketing campaigns are now directed by likes. Designers can certainly be swayed by popular opinion.

What impact will these social media platforms have on the future of design? Design will be faster. This is essential under the new and ever-changing market conditions. Designing slowly is not sustainable. Rather than spending time on costly immersion trips, designers can observe trends and behaviors via social media.

Design will be more competitive. Through online research, designers can see all relevant pricing for a product, and knowing those pricing targets allows the designer to reverse engineer the design to reach them. “Likes” and “follows” will continue to play a big part in the product development process, and they will help to shape the strategies for future development. Designers can get a sense of what is selling and how the market is responding to different products on different social channels. As the market is more transparent than ever before, marketing is no longer just the job of marketers.

Design will be more sustainable. Overconsumption has created vast amounts of generic product, and as such, excessive design is now highly visible. Consumer opinion on issues like sustainability and eco-friendliness will motivate manufacturers and designers to create more socially beneficial and environmentally friendly products. This is the first time that designers can hear directly from users about their concerns in these areas, and so designs (for everything from CPG products to customer service experiences) must radically shift accordingly. Consumers want to be heard, and designers finally have the ability to directly access their opinions.

Design will be more productive. Research in the past (like my magazine clippings) was easily lost or inaccessible – now it’s highly categorized and readily available. With more data aggregation, we will see less mistakes and revisions, as designers can research ideas with a better understanding of the outcomes and organize their ideas more effectively. Design inspiration used to live in a sketch book or folder. Now it’s classified and organized like a personal design library, allowing for more time spent being productive and creative.

Design will be more original.

But what’s the real lesson here?

With global access to trends and ideas, designers are more likely to create original work in order to avoid replication and lost productivity. Gone are the days of people hiding in a studio and sketching out their latest idea only to realize that someone else has already done the same thing. By being able to access practically all recent designs (both launched and conceptual), designers have a better sense of how original their ideas are.

It doesn’t matter if you pin on a bulletin board or an iPhone – following trends usually leads to generic work. The best design in the era of social media will come from those who can utilize the available technology to dive deeper and push further. Innovative designers will study trend reports, and then create the opposite. That will be the next evolution of design. Paul Rowan is the cofounder of Umbra and CCO at paulrowan.ca.

Supporting Fandom by Designing for the Core

PHOTO: TOOKAPIC

BY STEPHEN MEYER

Many in-game stadium and arena experiences at professional sporting events in North America are no longer attracting or retaining the audiences witnessed in the past, though this varies a bit depending on the team, time of day, opponent, or game scenario. Just look at most successful sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and NASCAR. Over the past few decades, fans have been choosing more often to stay at home to watch games, while some have outright dropped sports for new forms of entertainment that are available at a moment’s notice, whenever the urge strikes. Many sports analysts and personalities point to the obvious causes for this decline – increased ticket and concession prices, poor on-field play, transportation or logistical issues, or a fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) culture that diverts the attention of consumers. While these factors are all major influencers for how consumers perceive sports entertainment and whether or not they attend games, there is a much larger issue looming that is challenging the identity and purpose of “die hard” professional sports fans.

Even with lucrative, multi-billion-dollar broadcasting deals being signed with cable news networks and web companies, sports franchises are still looking to increase revenue by attracting new types of consumers to their stadiums and arenas. In order to fill seats, franchises have followed the formula many industries and corporations have relied on over the last few decades – segmenting consumers into discrete pricing categories based on their recognizable habits, while also appealing to their specific needs and desires with unique product and service offerings. This strategy is manifested in the design of the stadiums and arenas themselves; these venues feature unique sections that include just about anything, from an outdoor pool at EverBank Field in Jacksonville, to the oversized fish tank for luxury fans to view behind the home plate at Marlins Park in Miami, or the underground lounge currently being constructed at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Most, if not all, of these premium experiences aim to attract either highly affluent consumers or everyday experience-driven consumers, with both groups including patrons who may not actually be interested in the sport or game itself. As these premium experiences and specialized sections have evolved over the years, the actual purpose behind what franchises are designing has been lost. Are these organizations designing physical and digital structures and services for the game experience, or are they designing for the physical prowess and profitability of the stadium?

The Disjointed Stadium Today’s stadiums and arenas have created disjointed, non-unified experiences that are only too obvious to consumers. By physically segmenting consumers, these venues have defined sub-cultures of fandom – some of which are hidden behind glass walls, and many of which have individuals simply not watching the action on the court, field, or rink. Simple attentiveness to the event is no longer an expectation for sports fans; instead, they are given every reason to find something else to see, hear, touch, or smell. The entire purpose of going to a sporting event has been somewhat lost, as there is no longer a unifying culture, passion, or energy that is present and understood by all fans attending the event. During most regular season games, stadiums and arenas have cliques of individuals that may be in the same place physically, but that are not experiencing the same event as a collective group. Consider the following scenario: Imagine you and a group of friends catch a game of your favorite NBA basketball team. It is a regular season game, and you purchase $75 tickets to sit in section 300 at the top of the arena. The game starts at 7 p.m., and only half the seats are filled at tip-off – most people seated at tip-off are farthest from the court. By the end of the first quarter, fans closer to the court begin to trickle in to their suites, courtside seats, and the standing-room-only bar at the other side of the stadium.

Many suite attendees are not even sitting in their seats, choosing instead to eat their food platters, drink wine, and pour another beer from their personal tap. The courtside seats are filled, but many of the fans don’t even clap or cheer most of the game, as they are either conversing with a waitress, absent from their seat, or drinking a high-end cocktail. At the standingroom-only bar, attendees are staring at TV screens, as the collective group has found another game that is more interesting to watch. As you look around, you notice fans in general-admission seating staring at their phones, leaving to explore what the concourse has to offer, and admiring the luxuries visible in the premium sections. During the last few minutes of the game, some of the fans from different factions begin to cheer for the team during a few key possessions, while some have already left the arena. As the game ends in unspectacular fashion, you head home without a meaningful story or experience. Segmented experiences like the one described above have resulted in fans missing out, with die-hard sports fans losing the most. More specifically, they have lost the feeling that the team values them. These fans purchase season tickets, spend hundreds annually on team merchandise, and search for a consistent and gratifying game day experience that they can proudly parade as part of their personal identity. However, they are not being designed for, as their needs and desires are obvious and relatively easy to fulfill. Professional sports franchises are most certainly aware of these issues, but their response has historically been to ignore the in-game experience itself beyond some basic operational conveniences, including electronic ticketing and bathroom line alerts. Instead, franchises continue to bring more of the outside world into the stadium through enhancements, further segmenting both the experience and consumer groups. Whether they are providing wifi connectivity, lounges to watch TV, full cocktail bars, or playgrounds for children, stadiums and arenas are favoring modular, mass, general-purpose features and ignoring the possible connections the events themselves can create with consumers. If stadiums become glorified civic centers, then the emotional, uplifting, and breathtaking moments of sports may be lessened, leading to the inevitable attraction of less die-hard consumers. The effect of this could be exponential – if the core fan base is no longer interested in paying to see regular season games, who else is going to show up? What would a stadium have to offer that other public places, high-end malls, restaurants, or entertainment venues don’t have today? Franchises need to be reminded that the support of their die-hard fans forms the core from which other consumer bases are built; without the engagement of a core audience, there would be no corporate sponsors or box seats to be filled. If in-person sports viewing is going to be an intriguing entertainment option in the future, sports franchises need to begin designing for their core fans’ in-stadium experience by recognizing

the importance of a unified culture that all fans can share in with each and every game. The first step is to stop designing for everything and to design instead for the franchise’s principal purpose.

Designing a Fan-Controlled Future

PHOTO: TIM GOUW

The Current Situation

// By physically segmenting consumers, these venues have defined sub-cultures of fandom – some of which are hidden behind glass walls, and many of which have individuals simply not watching the action on the court, field, or rink. //

A fascinating example of in-game design is currently being tested with a small indoor football league team in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Salt Lake City Screaming Eagles have created the first fan-run professional football team in the United States, where fans have full autonomy to make all on-field decisions about calls, as well as related off-field operational and marketing decisions. Fans are in charge of everything from the game-day concession stand menu, to decisions about which players to sign and trade and what warm-up music should be played before the game. The Screaming Eagles are challenging the paradigm of what a fan is and what their purpose should be to the franchise itself. In this context, a sports fan is no longer just a visual support system to the team throughout the season, but is instead a crucial part of

the organization that is necessary for making the right decisions both on and off the field. Instead of just bringing more of the outside world into the stadium through modernization of digital technologies and physical structures, the Screaming Eagles have given fans a reason to pay attention to each and every game and on-field play, as the outcomes are a direct reflection of their personal decision making – and likely their personal pride. The Screaming Eagles do not necessarily have a proven business model, but these types of immersive in-game experiences could lead to more active, interested, and engaged fan bases. With both personal pride and human emotion at stake, fans from all segments will have a greater purpose for being at games and helping their teams win. If in-person sports entertainment is to survive the future of further digitized entertainment, die-hard fans themselves will need this type of purpose designed for them. Whatever gets those bums in seats, right? //// Stephen Meyer is manager of product realization at Idea Couture.

BY IDRIS MOOTEE

How do we prepare design students for challenges that no longer conform to the boundaries of design disciplines? There are many schools of design, with one end being the ultimate form of self-expression, and the other end being completely user-driven. The methods used in each school range from being completely focused on self-discovery, to being highly analytical and market-driven. Regardless of the extremes, design methodology has always been more focused on supporting the process of designing or making, and less focused on design thinking. Today, 90% of design tasks are aimed at resurfacing the existing face of things or, at best, changing the form of functional objects. That is not to say that there is no value in enhancing an everyday object to make it intelligently strong and emotively connected. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t push existing models beyond these simpler tasks. First, however, we must understand the three models that we consciously apply to design and what they mean. Let’s start with the designer-focused model. This is most commonly imagined as groups of designers sketching away an endless number of beautiful – but rough – sketches. With this model, a greater effort is needed to prevent our consumer culture from adopting the cheap and disposable, a pattern that is largely responsible for our sustainability problems. After all, the concept of designing for sustainability has been non-existent for centuries, until now – and it falls on designers today to embrace it. Next, let’s consider the problem-focused model. This is commonly viewed as a collection of circles and boxes that shows the intersection of spaces, or as sticky notes plastered all over the wall like random and unorganized components of a design problem (or, the intersection of problems and opportunities). The model of any specific problem can have a systems view, technology view, business view, user view, and even a social view, but picking and

Pushing the Models of Design to the Next Level

mixing these views helps to illuminate the real problems that we are trying to solve. Combining different views is not related to design craft – it is actually more about sensemaking, which Dave Snowden defines with this question: “How do we make sense of the world so we can act in it?” This idea carries with it the concept of sufficiency (in other words, knowing enough to make a contextually appropriate decision). Our third consideration is a design process model. In this processbased view, there is no best model to use, be it brand-driven, user-driven, or feature-driven. Everyone can follow a different model of what the process (linear or otherwise) should look like based on the context of the design mission in order to determine what is best. Often, these models are oversimplified into a three-circle process, which does not communicate anything of value. Sometimes, the uncertainties lie in all three parts and the design problem is undefined or misinterpreted. The interpretation of the design problem and the creation and selection of suitable creative or technical solutions are often left to be decided during the design process, using an oversimplified view from the designer. It’s true that, on rare occasions, a designer can come up with a brilliant and simple answer to an overcomplicated problem, but most of the time, the problems range from complicated to wicked – and this requires a lot more from the methods. Outside of the design framing problem mentioned above, the other issue is the notion that the designer is, to a large extent, free to design according to his or her own taste, style, and interpretation of the brand language. While this is sometimes necessary, most of the best commercial designs follow a unique design language that is well established – just think of Chanel, Porsche, Cartier, Hermès, and Apple. There are a lot of shortcomings of today’s design methods and how we teach them, despite a number of practitioners pushing for more updated methods. Design is not simply about ideas and

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Let’s Talk Design

craft; there is not enough attention being given to the structuring of design problems. Design itself is action-oriented or solutionoriented, and it needs to start with a definable problem – not just random exploration or an exercise in search of serendipity. Design can even be evidence-based. Yes, this is still a new idea in design education, and it is traditionally associated with healthcare, but evidence-based design (EBD) is making its way into the general design process. It focuses on conscientiously, explicitly, and judiciously using the best research-derived evidence available to make critical decisions and solve problems. As service design is slowly attracting interest, evidence-based design will be added to our current set of models. Should design remain a part of art school or, with all of our technical advances and massive analytics platforms providing

feedback, should it secure a better institution for itself? Scientific theories are a matter of constructing new models through experimentation, predicting future experimental results, and then producing new models. By this definition, many design disciplines are a work of science – not art – and as such, design should be treated as a science too, much like engineering. So, which will be the first design school to issue a Master of Science in Design? In Leonardo da Vinci’s time, specialization in art and science had not yet been polarized and educational systems were not divided like they are today. Perhaps it’s time to return to this way of thinking and doing. After all, art, design, and engineering are not meant to be enemies. A Master of Science in Art, anyone? //// Idris Mootee is global CEO of Idea Couture.

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Designing the Moneyball Algorithm

For Food

ILLUSTRATION: SALI TABACCHI

B Y M AYA O C Z E R E T K O

The food industry is changing. A number of ecological, economic, social, political, and technological forces are driving this change. Tech gadgets from the 90s that once filled garages have moved to kitchens. Digital natives (millennials and Gen Z-ers), who now outnumber baby boomers, are cooking, canning, fermenting, and dehydrating all kinds of unique foods to feed their insatiable appetites for new food experiences. This environment is creating opportunities for a new breed of entrepreneur to emerge: the foodpreneur. Digital natives shop differently; they’re wary of Big Food brands – unlike their parents, who took refuge in the comfort of a trusted brand. Millennials and Gen Z-ers are more likely to ask where their food comes from, are curious about who made it, and search for a compelling reason to take a bite. Today’s consumers’ desires are vast. They may be looking for a cognitive boost, moodenhancing effect, functional health benefit, new flavor, or personalized experience, or they may just hope to align to a brand’s values. Whatever the case, expectations are high. Their needs are highly segmented and rooted in a deep craving for authenticity. Foodpreneurs have taken note. Understanding these needs, foodpreneurs have been quick to bring new food and beverage products to market, upending categories and disrupting the entire food ecosystem as we know it. Foodpreneurs are paving the way for opportunity and stealing market share from Big Food companies that have been idle for decades. Now, venture

capitalists have begun pouring their money into the food and beverage space at record highs. Ryan Caldbeck, cofounder and CEO of CircleUp – an investment platform providing funding and resources to early-stage consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands – has been using technology to shape how foodpreneurs get access to funding in this emerging market for the past five years. CircleUp has helped over 160 food and beverage companies raise more than $180M in growth equity. Data-centric and mission-driven, CircleUp continues to forge ahead in its pursuit to help foodpreneurs thrive by giving them the capital and resources they so desperately need. I sat down with Caldbeck to discuss the changes in the industry and to learn about how CircleUp’s recently announced technology system, Helio, is using data science to find the top early-stage CPG brands and thus disrupt the venture capital model in the consumer industry, making them more efficient and active. Helio has been a dubbed a “moneyball” for investing in consumer companies – and its algorithms are revolutionary. The company uses a series of machine-learning algorithms to find and evaluate consumer companies, identifying those with the greatest potential for breakout success. Helio tracks billions of data points on over 1.2 million retail and CPG companies, feeding the algorithm that predicts which brands and companies have the greatest probability of success. Caldbeck’s approach is similar, to some degree, to Billy Beane’s successful use of sabermetrics while managing the Oakland Athletics baseball team. He was able to identify the stars before they became stars.

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// Foodprenuers have tapped into the rise of consumer desire for real, authentic, mission-driven brands by serving up new products, genuine and authentic entrepreneurial start-up stories, and new innovative brand personalities. //

Caldbeck explains that there is a lot of available data in the consumer space, making this space ripe for data science analysis. However, all the data is unstructured. Helio’s algorithms are built to make sense of it all, through the lens of an investor’s mind. It tracks a number of data points across relative strength of brand, team, distribution, financial performance, and product quality – all from afar, without CircleUp having to manually uncover the information. Thus, Helio understands where a company’s products are sold, how many stock keeping units (SKUs) certain retailers carry, how its products have been reviewed, its retail price points, the strength of its management team, its social media growth, and more. Helio’s algorithms make sense of all the data collected and allow the attractiveness – that is, the performance, potential, and likelihood of breaking through – of the company to be gauged. Caldbeck believes that one of the challenges in the consumer space is how hard it is for entrepreneurs with good ideas to get access to capital. “It’s challenging and inefficient,” he says. Helio, which takes its name from the Greek word for “sun,” illuminates the promising brands and entrepreneurs that might otherwise be obscured based on where they’re located or who they know. Helio makes sense of the big, complex, and difficult-to-navigate road to raising capital in the consumer space. Essentially, Helio is “shining light” on access to capital for breakthrough companies, helping entrepreneurs and investors alike. Despite the challenging path to funding, foodpreneurs have tapped into the rise of consumer desire for real, authentic, missiondriven brands by serving up new products, genuine and authentic entrepreneurial startup stories, and new innovative brand personalities. And consumers are eating it up! Startups have experienced a disproportionate amount of success in the food and beverage space. This success has been largely attributed to the newfound consumer desire for authenticity, coupled with decreased distribution costs, decreased marketing costs, and advances in technology. Caldbeck predicts that we will continue to see large brands rapidly lose market share to smaller brands in almost every category. Big Food companies have already lost $18B worth of market share to smaller players since 2011, and they continue to lose share and shelf space at an unprecedented rate. As Caldbeck explains, “That shift is fundamentally changing the landscape.” He believes that many larger companies will continue to see their core brands shrink dramatically over the next 10 years, with Big Food brands being reduced to half the size they are now. “What used to be a quest to find the next $2–3B brands is now the quest to find the next $20–100M brands,” Caldbeck explains. “Big brands will not be replaced by one or two new big brands, but hundreds of small brands! There will be fragmentation in the consumer industry which caters to the specific preferences and authenticity people are demanding.” Caldbeck continues, “The reality is, many of the past barriers to entry for the small brands, which existed for the past 80 years,

disappeared over the past 5 or 10 years. Historically, consumers were okay buying the same products over and over. Today, there is a fragmentation: The personalization of the consumer [has come to the fore]. Consumers want products that meet their own specific needs and tastes, and it’s hard for big brands to adapt to that, since they’ve historically offered mass-market, one-size-fits-all products. So, big brands are investing through their own corporate venture capital arms in small companies, and buying companies earlier and earlier. The average acquisition target used to be around $75–100M in revenue. Today, that’s come down to about $25M. That’s all been in response to the drop in barriers to entry and the pressure big brands face to keep up with the market.” In Caldbeck’s view, two “beautiful” things work together in the consumer industry to make Helio a powerful solution. First, the business models of consumer companies are all fairly similar. These companies make a product, ship it to a retailer, and sell it to people on a per-unit basis. Second, there is so much data in the consumer space. Information is available about what customers think of the product, where it’s sold, the number of SKUs it has, its price point, and the management team behind it – and changes to these variables are inputted on a monthly basis. The breadth and accessibility of data is the perfect recipe for data science. The result is Helio, a powerful lens into the performance of companies in an otherwise opaque market, which effectively matches rising stars with the right investors. Caldbeck describes the most difficult aspect of Helio as finding the companies to analyze, like “finding the companies that are only in the bodegas in New York City, or in the beauty shops in San Francisco.” The CircleUp team dedicated to building Helio works hard to build the algorithm in such a way that it can find those exact companies while they are in the early stages of distribution – that is, they are still small and undiscovered – yet on trend. A big part of this is taxonomy. What Caldbeck and his team have discovered, which many marketers reading this would attest to, is that there isn’t one consistent taxonomy in the food and beverage industry or across CPG more broadly. Everyone can label Kombucha as Kombucha, but how Nielsen, IRI, SPINS, or Whole Foods categorize Kombucha can vary greatly. Today, Helio has established 200 different product categories, which are continuously updated. Helio evaluates many different factors laddering up to success, putting brands and investors in a position to successfully come together. This is a machine-learning form of matchmaking. “We’re not suggesting Helio replace human judgment,” Caldbeck explains. “It is an additive to it – a superpower to help investors, buyers, retailers, or strategists to make better decisions.” In 2017, the network alone is not enough to be successful. Now, entrepreneurs are starting to get a leg up as Helio shines light on capital, illuminating the zoo that is the CPG space. //// Maya Oczeretko is a senior innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

Innovation at the intersection of technology, behavior, design, and food NOVE MBE R 1–3, 2017 The Culinary Institute of America at Copia Napa Valley, California

An important food revolution has begun. Now more than ever, it’s time to reThink Food! Spend three unforgettable days at the reThink Food leadership conference immersed in an atmosphere of exploration, stimulation, and discovery. Meet leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs in the food, business, marketing, science, and technology worlds. Register to attend and help shape the future! MISC readers get special pricing—just use code rTF17MISC when signing up. For details and registration information, visit www.re-thinkfood.org #rTFood in collaboration with

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One of your roles right now is as a professor of “inclusive design.” What is inclusive design, and how is it pushing the discipline and practice of design in new directions? Inclusive design is design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference. Basically, it’s about recognizing that we’re really diverse and unique, and that such diversity has specific design implications. With industrial design, we’re designing for the masses; we’re trying to find the standard by which we can design mass products in a cost-effective way for lots of particular people. Alternatively, inclusive design says, “There’s a lot of value in designing for people who do not fit into the narrow parameters that we’ve used our ergonomic charts and tables to figure out.” What does it mean, for example, to design for people with certain physical disabilities who do not fit into those charts? Ultimately, inclusive design is not about creating multiple products to suit men, women, children, or other groups. It’s about considering each specific individual in all of their complexity and thinking. How do we design for them? How do we allow that individual to customize, within a range of products and services, whatever experiences most align with their many complexities? That is really challenging to do, and it works against our modernist paradigm around what design is, its value, the ability to scale, and all the things that are important for how we talk about design.

An Interview with Dr. Dori Tunstall

B Y D R. M AYA S H A P I R O

Dr. Dori Tunstall, Dean of the Faculty of Design at OCAD University and the first black dean of a faculty of design anywhere, is not your typical design leader. Dr. Tunstall, who comes to her current work with a PhD in anthropology, has a history of founding and participating in initiatives that strive to decolonize innovation. Her mandate is the promotion of a form of “respectful design,” which considers the impacts of human-made objects on both the natural and supernatural worlds. Dr. Tunstall explores how design can address the needs and wants of a greater number of living things in more nuanced ways, all while facilitating conversations about equality, diversity, and connection in order to promote lasting change around how and why humans make what we make. We spoke with Dr. Tunstall about her views, goals, and sources of inspiration in the overlapping worlds of design and innovation.

PHOTO: ERIK BIJ DE VAATE

Inclusive Design

In what places or industries do you see inclusive design happening? A lot of the things that have happened in the technology sector have been inclusive. Many companies, including Microsoft, Adobe, and – to some extent – IBM, are using inclusive design because they actually have to reach everyone and customize for everyone. Large-scale companies have to be inclusive. On the other hand, there are also niche places that are offering inclusive services. Maybe it’s because they’re more nimble or because they believe in the ethos and the mission of it. The idea is to go with the outliers. Then you should find out what element of their experience you can improve or optimize, and then you can roll that out for a larger group of people who may have variations of those disabilities. All disabilities exist on a spectrum, which means that if you can find that core improvement for an individual or set of individuals and allow that solution to be flexible, you can meet the needs of everyone – even those on the margins of that disability. It seems like inclusive design is just good strategy. Yes. That’s the best quote, because it really is just good strategy. Then why has it been slow to catch on? I think it’s because our driving business paradigm is the 80/20 rule. We try to go for 80% of things with 20% of the effort. Inclusive design flips that. You might do 80%

of the work in response to 20% of whatever the field is. From the perspective of economic rationalism, it can be hard for a company to convince itself to do the inclusive thing. There’s a lot of risk. So, I think we have to change our paradigms. We need to ask ourselves, what is it we’re trying to do in order to innovate better? The spaces where that risk is tolerated more are within the realm of innovation. You’ve written and spoken about the concept of respectful design. What is that and how is it distinct from inclusive design? One of the things that make respectful design distinct is that, while inclusive design is focused on human diversity, respectful design takes that same understanding and places it within the context of the entire natural world. On occasion, it can also apply to the supernatural world. It comes from an understanding of the differences among plant, mineral, and animal species (I’m including humans as an animal species here). Respectful design asks how you can understand and respect the fact that everything in the world needs to exist and be recognized for its own existence, and not just for its benefit to humans. This is linked to decolonization in design, which is partly based on indigenous principles around respect for all other living creatures. Specifically, it is about seeing your own existence as being relational to those living creatures. It’s not about categorizing things in terms of species, but is instead about really defining every thing in terms of its relationships to all other things. What is my relationship to this river, this animal, this plant, or this rock? Respectful design is about trying to build a sense of respect in the same way you would have respect for your brother, sister, mother, or father. How do you bring that to everything around you, to the things that support you and that you have a responsibility to support as well? Respectful design is important because we need to bring in marginal perspectives to what we would consider a design solution. We need to do that so that there is innovation and so that exclusion doesn’t allow design solutions to inflict harm. How does decolonizing design contribute to a wider project of inclusion? The way the history of design has been told ignores the specificity of its particular origins. The process of decolonization must first recognize how design principles have come to be, and especially that design is not a culturally neutral practice. Once we acknowledge that, we can develop alternative practices and allow for other modalities of making to be recognized and valued as equal, but different. This links to inclusive design, because what decolonization has at its core is the idea that everyone is different, but equal. What I mean by “equal” is not that everything is the same, or that design should be the same for everyone. It’s not one size fits all, but one size fits one. Since every culture has its differences, each culture should be recognized as different – but they

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shouldn’t be ranked in a hierarchy. We have to ask ourselves how we can recognize all of these differences and structure our interactions in response to them without trying to rank everything. What’s inspiring you right now? I’m inspired in some ways by being in Canada. There are so many catalysts for things going on at OCAD University, where I work. The number one principle of our academic plan is decolonization. This is possible because the Canadian government has decided to accept the recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation report [a six-year government-funded research report summarizing the statements of 6,000 survivors of Canada’s residential school system for Indigenous children]. With this action, the government is saying that it is important to reconcile Canada’s past and the ways in which it has been disrespectful and has operated on the basis of exclusion. I’m inspired by the commitment to social, cultural, environmental, and economic justice that could come from that. OCAD

University is responding to that shift. My job is to symbolically embody this shift, but it is also to champion certain processes of decolonization so that they move more smoothly through the institution. This is very different to my experience in Australia, where even though there was an official governmentissued apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples, the notion of incorporating the perspectives of people from Indigenous communities into the government is still being debated. And this idea is not even part of the conversation in the United States. In Canada, it’s a very active and live conversation, which opens up so many possibilities about how we think about inclusion, respectful relations, and the role design can play in it all. //// Dr. Maya Shapiro is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. Dr. Dori Tunstall is Dean of the Faculty of Design at OCAD University.

PHOTO: UNIVERSITY OF THE FRASER VALLEY

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A New Layer in History

BY ROLANDO HINOJOSA A N D YA DI R A O R N E L A S

Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Oscar-winning director behind The Revenant and Birdman, once said that his native Mexico City is “this big, complex monster of a city that has always had real problems and needs,” going on to explain that he’s “always found [his] way through it in different ways.” But it’s not just the Mexican capital’s denizens that have found different ways to inhabit and traverse its space; the city itself has been a remarkable example of mutability during its nearly seven-century-long story. It’s partly thanks to this powerful story that Mexico City has been named as 2018’s World Design Capital (WDC) by the World Design Organization (WDO). This designation is awarded to a different city biennially, based on the city’s commitment to using design as a tool for economic, social, and cultural development. Mexico City joins the five previous WDCs (Taipei, Cape Town, Helsinki, Seoul, and Torino) as the first city in the Americas to receive this honor. Throughout a yearlong event program, WDCs showcase best practices for design via sustainable, design-led urban policies and innovations that improve quality of life for residents. Mugendi K. M’Rithaa, WDO president and professor of industrial design at Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, hopes that “Mexico City will serve as a model for other megacities around the world grappling with the challenges of urbanization and using design thinking to ensure a safer, more liveable city.” To that end, WDC CDMX 2018’s official theme, “Socially Responsible Design,” was chosen to reflect “an ambition to promote the role of design and creativity as agents of social and cultural change within the urban context.” But even as it transforms itself to better confront the growing challenges of massive urbanization in the 21st century, Mexico City will need its design to be respectful of the communities it seeks to improve. This tension between revolutionary change and the permanence of tradition and history is of particular relevance for the Mexican metropolis, which is not just one of the most populated urban areas in the world, but also the oldest capital city in the Americas.

Mexico City and the Quest for Socially Responsible Transformation Through Design

PHOTO: JEZAEL MELGOZA

Growing Pains Since its origins as Tenochtitlan (the capital of the Aztec Empire) in the 14th century, throughout its history as the crown jewel of the Spanish Empire, and even today, as one of the largest and most diverse cities in the world, Mexico City has always been “a city of superlatives.” As Juan Miró, an architect and professor at the University of Texas in Austin, explains: “Few, if any, can rival the richness of the layers beneath it.” Nestled in a large, mountainous valley 2,240 meters above sea level, the city’s footprint grew from around 80 square kilometers in 1950 to a metropolitan area of about 8,000 square kilometers in the span of 60 years. During the same period, its population went from around 3 million inhabitants to about 22 million.

Harvard Gazette reports that for José Castillo, an architect and lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, “Mexico City as a megacity can serve as a universal paradigm that cities should learn from in the future. The allure of the megalopolis becomes very appealing as an object of study.” But even though Mexico City’s enormous size, frenetic growth, and rich diversity are all part of its charm, they also represent challenges that would be hard for any city to confront – let alone one that now houses close to a fifth of its country’s population and economic output. Deficits in affordable housing (in both quantity and quality), air pollution, water mismanagement, transportation infrastructure issues, and the effects of terrain subsidence stand out among the many challenges stemming from the city’s rapid and unplanned urbanization. In the eyes of the World Bank, “the rapid and uncoordinated growth of urban footprints” has exacerbated these challenges with sprawling development that is “distant, dispersed, and disconnected,” and which has underused the city’s “potential to boost economic growth and foster social inclusion and liveability.” Overcoming these challenges only becomes more complicated as time goes by and the city’s sprawl grows, increasingly bleeding into surrounding districts and requiring even more coordination between local, state, and federal authorities. Reporting for Inverse, Neel V. Patel predicted that Mexico City “will spend the next hundred years tackling the problems of the previous 30.”

Designing Solutions Faced with these mounting urban challenges, Mexico City has increasingly turned to design as a source of innovative solutions and interventions to become more sustainable and, ultimately, more liveable. This influence was visible at a recent lecture co-sponsored by Harvard’s Department of Urban Planning and Design, where Mexico City’s mayor, Miguel Ángel Mancera, shared some of the city’s efforts and commitments to combatting climate change and its effects. This collaboration between the city’s government and the design community can also be seen in the way the Mexican capital pitched itself to the WDO through a joint bid led by Design Week Mexico (DWM), a non-profit organization that promotes design as an engine of social change. Started in 2008, DWM’s yearly event program creates an important opportunity to showcase the work of designers of all stripes, provide platforms that bring together actors in the creative community, and push for the use of design as a tool for economic, social, cultural, and environmental development. “Mexico City has a vibrant design scene, which has gained increased international attention over the last few years,” says Emilio Cabrero, cofounder of DWM and head of the office responsible for organizing WDC CDMX 2018. “World Design Capital presents an opportunity to challenge and demonstrate our ability to

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Respectful Transformation Although WDC CDMX 2018 seeks to change Mexico City for the better, the initiative acknowledges that in order for design to be truly socially responsible, it shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater; transformations must be performed with respect to the valuable elements that already exist, whether those come in the form of physical structures or more intangible social and cultural ones. After all, cities aren’t inert, monolithic agglomerations of buildings; rather, they are living organisms built upon the interactions of thousands of individual human beings. Cabrero asks, “How are we going to generate communication and dialogue networks between different sectors? How can we try, through design, to make the city more plural, more inclusive, so that not everything is stratified by socioeconomic sectors? How can we make the city of the 21st century different?” These are the challenges of a city that has been messily growing for nearly 700 years, expanding horizontally by absorbing neighboring towns and vertically by building on layer upon layer of history. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter phenomenon can be seen in Mexico City’s Historic Center, where the remains of Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor (Main Temple) were discovered in the 20th century. The Aztec ruins were found buried beneath modern houses and streets next to the Spanish colonial architecture of the Metropolitan Cathedral, the National Palace, and the Plaza de la Constitución (more commonly known as El Zócalo). The Aztecs believed that the Templo Mayor was located at the center of the universe and El Zócalo, the city’s main square, embodies that myth. For centuries, the wide, flat expanse of stone has remained an important gathering place, both for Mexico City residents and the country at large, in times of celebration and of protest.

In her magnum opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote that “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” As Marco Coello, also a cofounder at C Cúbica Arquitectos and DWM, points out, “Political parties change, agendas change, all the time. But what makes this city are its inhabitants.”

Socially Responsible Transformation Through Design Respecting local social issues in the midst of necessary change and upheaval is challenging for any city, but this becomes particularly difficult in a cosmopolitan megalopolis of over 20 million people – especially one that acts as a melting pot in a country of close to 130 million people. Nevertheless, success stories do exist. Diane Davis, chair of Harvard’s Department of Urban Planning and Design, has highlighted the work of Mexico City’s Public Space Authority (known as the AEP in Spanish). Since its inception in 2009, the AEP has implemented several projects to renovate and create public spaces in order to improve sustainability, social engagement, and economic development. The AEP’s work combines urban design with public consultation, resulting in a positive impact that does not sideline community involvement or selfdetermination. In some cases, this engagement has even led to the formation of neighborhood institutions that have endured after the intervention is finished. A controversial example of what happens when design seeks to intervene in a space without fully taking the existing culture into account can be seen in the Corredor Cultural Chapultepec (CCC) project. The CCC, a proposed multi-level urban park that would have run alongside Avenida Chapultepec, evoking New York City’s High Line, was cancelled after intense backlash from local residents. The project’s rejection, made clear via public consultation and protests, stemmed from concerns about gentrification and the displacement of long-time residents, as well as questions concerning just how public the finished space would be, with critics likening the project more to a private mall than a public park. However, as difficult as it is to achieve respectful and inclusive change at a large scale, neither continuing business as usual nor reducing communities to a static life as cultural dioramas are promising answers to the challenges of urbanization. Transformation is still required for Mexico City to thrive; the World Bank indicates that the status quo of unplanned expansion has affected the city’s “ability to foster liveability and social inclusion and [has] exacerbated spatial disparities in access to services, urban amenities, and job opportunities.” Mexican writer and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz said that resilience was one of his country’s most popular virtues. “We admire fortitude in the face of adversity more than the most brilliant triumph.” Throughout its long, diverse life, Mexico City has witnessed volcanic

PHOTO: ISRAELJAM22

use design solutions to address the social and urban challenges our city is facing. Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Design Week Mexico, we are determined to create a moment for design professionals, creatives, and the general public alike to come together and rethink the role of design in our society in an impactful way.” As cofounder of multidisciplinary architecture firm C Cúbica Arquitectos, Cabrero emphasizes the importance of collaboration, stressing that designers can “support specialists tasked with making things functional, sustainable, and aesthetic, because through design you can rehabilitate public space and therefore improve people’s quality of life.” He adds, “Design is everything. Through design, you can improve everything, from parks and public space to mobility tools that impact quality of life. Who benefits from design? We all do.” Cabrero hopes that WDC CDMX 2018 will “build a platform for collaboration not just between design disciplines, but also between countries,” explaining that “[WDC] seek[s] to create a hub of global creative industries that have an impact on their societies.”

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// These are the challenges of a city that has been messily growing for nearly 700 years, expanding horizontally by absorbing neighboring towns and vertically by building on layer upon layer of history. //

eruptions, years-long floods, the violence of war, earthquakes, and an ever-growing influx of people placing demands on it – and still it stands. However, if the city is to be more than an example of fortitude and resilience, if it is to thrive and not just survive in the face of its current challenges, it must once again transform itself. Socially responsible design can be the instrument that achieves this transformation without forgetting the importance of what has come before it. Becoming a WDC is a great honor for Mexico City, a testament to the achievements of its citizens, and an opportunity to push for design to have an even greater positive impact in its surroundings. But that great honor comes with great responsibility. It’s an opportunity that must not be squandered and that should be viewed as the start of a new chapter in the city’s narrative, one that the city’s denizens can be proud of. //// Rolando Hinojosa is a researcher and editor at Idea Couture. Yadira Ornelas is director, IC Mexico.

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BY IDRIS MOOTEE

When did design begin? I am not talking only about the “heroic” or “aesthetic” notion of design. Nor am I interested in the few superstar designers who are studied and unquestionably revered. Design, at its core, is a reflection of human history. It should not be overly academic. And, although there is always an artist inside each designer, design history is not only art history; practitioners need to see design as a branch of social and cultural studies as well – this will make for a better future for design. But many people have strong opinions about the topic of design, so repositioning it outside of the field of art history requires significant changes to our pedagogical and philosophical approaches. Let’s go back to our roots. As the late Carroll Gantz – who led industrial design teams at both Black & Decker and Hoover and was the head of the design department at Carnegie Mellon – explained in his book Founders of American Industrial Design, industrial design as a profession began after the Great Depression, when a group of creative individuals from a variety of artistic fields (including theater, advertising, fashion, and furniture design) pioneered a new line of work. He wrote, “Responding to unprecedented public and industry demand for new styles, these artists entered the industrial world during what was called the Machine Age, to introduce modern design to the external appearance and form of mass-produced, functional, mechanical consumer products formerly not considered art.” It was at this point in time that art and design began evolving and converging. About 60 years later came the “information revolution” that expanded the discipline of design into areas like information design and software user interface design. Ultimately, these came together and created another new profession: interaction design. Today, design is being pushed into new territory once more; we use it to solve different types of problems, many of which are neither tangible nor straightforward.

Design can be seen as a key facet of our being; it is the culmination of our thoughts, our imaginations, and our hopes for a better life. Whether subtle or not, design has impacted humanity for decades and continues to impact almost every layer of our social fabric. It plays a central role in who flourishes and who flounders. It helps us to navigate the world in which we live and explore options beyond the biophysical existence we’ve inherited. Material design and creation is the driver of our civilization and culture, as it helps to accelerate economic development and growth. As the technologies we design continue to shape our future – particularly the future of work – the next big evolution of design will be intrinsically tied to creating meaning. As the virtual world increasingly infiltrates our physical world, the systems of meaning that we design will become ever more important. As we move into this future, new professions will crop up just as they did in years past; “meaning designers” and “meaning advisors” will become just as common as financial advisors and personal trainers. Rather than worrying about whether AI will take over their jobs, professionals in 2025 will be concerned about designing for and offering meaning and purpose. Designing for meaning will impact organized religion and governments too. Technology will allow us to overlay our everyday experiences with fictional scenarios and people, changing how we view both our past and our future. As the concept of “truth” will become increasingly subjective, design will help us cement our perceptions and connect our future with our past. The purpose of design has always been to test our limits and to help us determine what we believe. As Stephen Hawking says, “humans have entered a new stage of evolution,” and design will help us succeed in this new environment. We are designing in unknown territories. //// Idris Mootee is global CEO of Idea Couture.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

The Evolution of Design is the Evolution of the Human

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Bizglish: Designed to Disappear

Blogfodder

Brandologist

Urban Dictionary defines this as any story, idea, or link that becomes or inspires the subject of a blog. The word “fodder” comes from the Middle English word for food or feed; in its original context, it most often refers to cattle feed. A more brutal usage can be seen in the expression “cannon fodder” – literally, food for cannons – as a way of referring to the dispensability of soldiers in battle. Given the millions of blogs out there – which, by appearing online, expose themselves to a relentless ordnance of hostile commentary – perhaps the military use of “fodder” is most appropriate in connection to this now ubiquitous form of digital literature.

Literally, one who studies brands and branding. Branding is indeed a fascinating and worthy subject of study, as it has been in development for thousands of years and can be observed in all commercial, political, and religious histories. Despite this long history, the term “branding” has only really emerged in the last 30 years or so. And it has only been in the last 20 years that certain writers have started recognizing that branding was not invented on Madison Avenue, but rather, that it saw its greatest and most successful manifestation in 16th-century Rome during a series of actions now commonly “branded” as the CounterReformation. (Also called Baroque.)

Brandelabra

B Y D R. PA U L H A R T L E Y AND WILL NOVOSEDLIK

The language of business today is constantly invaded by made-up terms or catchphrases that live and die in newsfeeds, blogs, keynotes, and serious business press like so many semantic mayflies. ne minute they’re not there, the next we’re swarmed by them, and – ust as suddenly they disappear.

One form of linguistic expression stands out in particular: the portmanteau. This word is what we might call an etymological “twofer,” in that its original meaning – a large trunk designed to carry all your stuff, from toothbrushes to topcoats, on a long voyage – is itself an example of the rhetorical definition it has assumed more recently. The original term consists of the French word porte, a derivative of the verb porter (to carry), and manteaux (a jacket). In its more contemporary usage, a portmanteau is a literary term referring to a word made by combining two previously unrelated items in order to express new meaning, with common examples including “beefalo,” “schnoodle,” and “mockumentary.” This linguistic juxtaposition can also be interpreted as a metaphor for one of the core practices of innovation: that of juxtaposing two ideas or terms from totally unrelated contexts to create a third, brand new idea. One caveat: The definitions below combine truths and bald-faced lies, a condition which has sadly come to define the way information is exchanged in this post-truth era. We’ll leave it to you to sort out the difference between the facts and what the redoubtable Kellyanne Conway has so infamously referred to as “alternative facts.” It shouldn’t be too difficult. Enjoy!

A curious conflation of an English word (“brand”) and the Spanish word for “word” (palabra), a “brandelabra” is a collection of brands that are part of an extended family in which brands speak to each other without actually saying anything substantially different from one another. It is the branding equivalent of a “palaver,” which is the word for a prolonged, pointless discussion (not unlike the article you are currently reading). It is also a way of labeling the lazy-ass practice of creating endless brand extensions, much like the Hollywood practice of filming endless sequels. The result is usually a dilution of what made the original brand great in the first place. This is also known in the trade as “milking it.”

Brandthropomorphism This is a really snooty way of referring to that tired old chestnut, “If your brand were a person, who would it be?” To anthropomorphize a brand (see previous entry) is a common but extremely ineffective way of trying to imagine who its target should be or what human attributes the brand should reflect in order to be attractive. This approach is ineffective because it tends to ignore the nuances and contradictions that constitute any real human being, instead favoring an oversimplified and, consequently, micro-thin profile of something resembling “yer average consumer.” Sure sounds smart though, don’t it?

Brandthropology

Bosshole

One of the more complicated forms of ethnographic inquiry, “brandthropology” is the study of the behavior of brands acting as individuals. It is an ethnographic examination of how brands live in the world and how they change the way that people live their lives. It is the study of the impact of “brandthropomorphism” (see next entry). As a practical human science, brandthropology focuses on understanding brands as social actors and is definitely not a fake methodology thought up by an agency to differentiate its offerings from its competition.

If you can’t figure this one out, you shouldn’t be in business. Or anywhere near heavy machinery.

Cewebrity Someone who is famous for being online, but is not necessarily known in the real world. So, you have a blog? And a YouTube channel? And an Instagram account? Even a Pinterest board? And how many followers? Whoa, really? Why have I never heard of you? Because I still watch cable TV, read books, get the newspaper (print version), hail taxis instead of pinging Uber, and eat lunch instead of ordering from Foodora. I’m a Boomer! And no, there’s not an app for that.

Cliteracy Not quite sure how one would define this without inviting a sound thrashing from Cindy Gallop (unless, of course, such a prospect turns you on). In all seriousness though, “cliteracy” is a term originally coined by New York-based conceptual artist Sophia Wallace to describe her art practice. In her words, “CLITERACY is a mixed-media project that explores a paradox: the global obsession with sexualizing female bodies in a world that is illiterate when it comes to female sexuality. CLITERACY is a new way of talking about citizenship, sexuality, human rights, and bodies. The project reveals the ‘phallic as neutral’ bias in science, law, philosophy, politics, mainstream, and even feminist discussion, and the art world – which is so saturated with the female body as subject.”

Culturematic The title of a book by esteemed anthropologist Grant McCracken (not to be confused with McCraken, the three-year-old colt who recently placed eighth in the Kentucky Derby). As Dr. McCracken recently described it in an interview with Harvard Business Review, “A culturematic is a little experiment that, in a playful counterintuitive way, broaches a kind of what if. [Like] in the case of Bud Caddell, for instance, said well, what if I pretend that I am a member of the mail room in the TV show Mad Men. But what if I tweet as if I were inside that mail room?… So these culturematics are little engagements with culture that end up discovering cultural meaning that we didn’t know existed, and creating economic value that we hadn’t glimpsed.” Just don’t try to pretend you’re a thoroughbred in a foot race against a three-year-old Kentucky-bred colt. You’ll be tweeting horseshit. And probably wearing it too.

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Deathnography

Netnoblography

Given that one of the stated purposes of ethnography is to study aspects of the human experience that are shared by everyone, “deathnography” is one of the most fundamental of its sub-disciplines. A deathnographer seeks to understand, through participatory observation, the phenomena that are common to the end-of-life experience. However, because deathnography requires a cross-cultural, comparative perspective, practitioners of deathnography must also be skilled in the methodologies of its sister discipline, resurrectology.

A form of textual-utterance analysis that is a second cousin twice removed of sociolinguistic anthropology. It involves understanding those social utterances and methods of the social production of meaning limited to blog entries and micro-blogging sites like Twitter. The major focus of this field of study is coming to terms with why anyone would do this kind of thing in the first place. Additionally, netnoblographers explore the phenomena and sociability of writing long tracts that will be read by no one whatsoever. The applied version of netnoblography is a kind of desk research that is used by industrial ethnographers to replace the arduous work of actually talking to human beings. The major journals for this field can be found on WordPress in the dustier corners of the internet.

Entremanure Been to your LinkedIn feed lately? Between all the selfcongratulatory posts (So thrilled to be the keynote at Shopper Marketing Mini Expo 2017! See you in Dubuque on December 23rd!) and the crowdsourced opinions about which 39-cent logo you just bought from Fiverr. com is best (Should I choose the one with the inverted green swoosh or the one with the orange antlers?), you get a lot of these hortatory links to listicles of entrepreneurial success, like “The Top 17 Rules for Successful Dog Show Management” or “What America’s Leading Pipe Organ Retailers Tweet Before Breakfast.” Unlike real manure, however, entremanure has no growth-inducing properties and tends to be no more useful than the effluent that periodically blocks the world’s toilets.

Netnography An online methodology of social science research developed in reaction to increased online activity. The major text on the topic is Netnography Redefined by Robert V. Kozinets, a communications professor at USC Annenberg. The approach is based on examining human behavior by observing the online traces of communicative action. While it is an excellent way to enter into a discussion and examine the production of meaning, it is troubled by the fact that the internet is not a populated place filled with ethnographic detail, but a record of the traces of what people are doing in their lives. It is only half a field site and is the entry point to, but not the actual land of, the place people seek.

Simplexity

Stuffocation

Soonologist

According to James Wallman, author of the book Stuffocation: Living More With Less, “stuffocation” is “a feeling of being oppressed by one’s ungovernable heap of belongings.” There are reality TV shows about this stuff now, wherein we, the viewers, are invited into the infinitely cluttered homes of pathological hoarders to vicariously experience the depth of these poor souls’ neuroses. This term is also applicable to the infinitely cluttered slides of a typical corporate PowerPoint presentation, wherein us viewers are invited to remain awake while a suit drones on about CAGRs, COGS, and CAPEX for 150 slides or so. The only difference here is that the latter form of stuffocation is usually associated with a wildly inflated price tag. ////

A conceptual unicorn in business, simplexity is a state of being where one can deal with complex issues in a simple way. As it is used in business, it is a concept that suggests that business practices can still be simple, reductionist actions and that all complex things can be dealt with in such a way that their actual complexity can be ignored or effaced entirely. But it is actually more complicated than that. It is a term that has its roots in general systems theory, which is anything but simple. It is a construction used to indicate a complementary, yet dialectical, relationship between simple things and their complicated underpinnings. Simplexity, like anything in this life, is more complicated than most people think. Simple!

Soonologists are speculative thinkers who refuse to consider the future as an object of study. They are only concerned with what will happen soon, limiting themselves solely to the next few minutes, and they resist any attempt to be drawn into speculative action concerning a future beyond that. Soonologists are perhaps better understood through what they are not. They are not futurists, because they abstain from trying to make predictions about the future based on very little evidence, rigor, or reason. They are not foresight practitioners, because they deny the idea that causal drivers exist and that the future is anything more than a productive fiction symptomatic of a particular mode of seeing the present. And they are not speculative realists, because they deny any type of objectivity that could possibly yield a coherent, future-focused vision of reality.

Dr. Paul Hartley is executive director and cofounder, Institute for Human Futures and a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. Will Novosedlik is AVP, head of growth partnerships at Idea Couture.

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and the Grey,” envisioned what urban communities can – and should – be. An architect and engineer by training, Carlo Ratti is the director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab and co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Council on the Future of Cities and Urbanization. He spoke to MISC to share his thoughts on building better spaces for tomorrow.

Editing Real-World Problems Eliciting Change Through Design Thinking and Innovative Technology

BY STEPHANIE KAPTEIN

With the rise of the IoT and AI, we have begun viewing innovative technology as a standalone disruptor. The introduction of a single technological advancement now has the power to instantaneously change our everyday lives. However, this is much more systematic and evolutionary in nature. Change is created by building on the past with small mutations or improvements that slowly form the future. Although these may not be able to provide a single solution that will immediately solve global problems, we can continuously take incremental steps in the right direction that encourage us to abandon our previous unsustainable behaviors. We are bound to the notions of our present life – but alternative possibilities allow us to imagine ourselves within a different world.

A world that not only adheres to our everyday needs and desires, but that also has the best interest of the natural environment and global community at heart. Through a collection of four immersive installations, EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation & Technology, presented by the Design Exchange from September 28 to October 8, 2017 in Toronto, challenged our problemriddled present with thoughtprovoking alternatives. Organized within the pillars of Shelter/Cities, Nourish, Care, and Educate, the multi-sensory exhibits acted as an “edit” of real-world problems and displayed how design thinking coupled with innovative technology can help elicit change. Carlo Ratti, curator of the Shelter/ Cities exhibition, showcased architectural innovations and technologies that bridge the gap between city and nature. His exhibition, “The Green

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE LOWLINE; DEBORAH LOWERY

What first drove you to pursue a career in architecture and the built environment? I always liked the idea of design, as defined by Herbert A. Simon: “The natural sciences are concerned with how things are… Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be.” I like this definition, as it is inclusive – it is not bound to architecture, urban planning, or engineering, but it leads to an omni-disciplinary approach. For those unfamiliar with “smart cities,” can you describe what they are and their relevance for today? First of all, allow me to say that I’m not a big fan of the expression “smart city.” I prefer to use instead the term “senseable city,” with its double meaning, both “able to sense” and “sensible.” The word “senseable” puts more emphasis on the human – as opposed to the technological – side of things. The senseable city is simply the manifestation of a broad technological trend: the internet is entering the places we live and becoming the Internet of Things, allowing us to interact with the space around us in new ways. Applications are manifold, spanning from energy to waste management, from mobility to water distribution, from city planning to citizen engagement. In your opinion, which cities are currently on their way to becoming senseable cities? I do not see a particular city, a “winner takes all.” Conversely, I see many cities experimenting with different facets. For instance, Singapore is carrying out exciting work in mobility, Copenhagen in sustainability, Boston in citizen participation.

What is the role of designers in the development of senseable cities? I think that the role of the designer is to challenge the present by introducing alternate possibilities to pave the way toward the future. This is not dissimilar from Buckminster Fuller’s idea of comprehensive anticipatory design science (CADS) – a systematic approach to design used “to solve problems by introducing into the environment new artifacts, the availability of which will induce their spontaneous employment by humans and thus, coincidentally, cause humans to abandon their previous problem-producing behaviors and devices.” Quite interestingly, Buckminster Fuller was proposing an evolutionary framework for design. In this context, we can think of the designer as what, in biology, is referred to as a “mutagen” – an agent that produces mutations and accelerates the transformation of the present into what it “ought to be.” It’s a process we call “futurecrafting.” How are you currently using futurecrafting to envision the cities of the future? Through futurecrafting, we posit future scenarios (typically phrased as what if questions), entertain their consequences and exigencies, and share the resulting ideas widely to enable public conversation and debate. We believe that design can be used as a systematic germination of possible futures, intervening at the interface between people, technologies, and the city. Research and applications can be developed that empower citizens to make better choices about where they live. What is the importance of engaging the general public in your work? Huge! Decisions about our collective urban future should be made collectively.

You recently curated one of the four featured exhibits at EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation & Technology, presented by the Design Exchange. Can you discuss your vision? We are pleased that our Shelter/Cities exhibition debuted at this first-ever biennial expo-meets-festival in Toronto at the East Harbour between September 28 and October 7. EDIT is a celebration of Canada’s past on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, but it looks into the future. What inspired the exhibition was a vision from over a century ago: that of French anarchic geographer Élisée Reclus, who wrote: “People must have the dual possibility of gaining access to the delights of the city, with its solidarity of thought and interest, its opportunities for study and art education, and, at the same time, the freedom that is nourished by nature and is realized through the varieties of its open horizons.” Through my exhibition, “The Green and the Grey,” we want to explore how new technologies allow us to bring nature to cities in new ways – helping to fulfill Reclus’s century-old dream. //// To learn more about EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation & Technology, visit editdx.org. Stephanie Kaptein is a foresight strategist at Idea Couture.

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The Principles of Design

BY L EE FA I N

Over the past 20 years, I’ve had experiences or offered services within a wide range of jobs. My first taxable income came from working for McDonald’s in Schertz, Texas, just north of my high school on I-35. From there, I went onto selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, working in a movie theater, holding various restaurant and hospitality positions, managing a dorm of college students, lifeguarding during the summers, and even working as a house man in a Victorian brownstone for a large estate in downtown Savannah, Georgia. I’ve had over 30 jobs, including my recent profiles within corporate and professional consulting. One thing that I noticed, regardless of the job, service, or company I was working for, was that there was always a certain way of doing things. Most organized

companies had their mission statements, core company principles, or brand promises that they would promote through annual training or online course completions, and certainly through the company culture. But as an hourly employee, I was never really exposed to the process of defining who the customer was, what they really wanted, or even learning who our customers were in the first place. This changed when I started working in more corporate roles, where I learned how to actually design the experience and principles that others would deliver to targeted users. Design principles are what your designers should design for, what your marketing department should promote, what your engineers should consider as their constraints, and what your business unit leaders should understand in order to connect with the proper unique value propositions. They are more than just a

PHOTO: SEBASTIAN MANTEL

Four Elements to Make Your Product More Relevant

branding promise, and they are certainly not limited to a list of what the competition has done in the marketplace (which you are already 6-12 months behind, anyway). At the core, design principles are the foundation that allows your company to define opportunities beyond chasing after profits and margins. They help determine what to do, and, equally importantly, what not to do when scaling your product or service. Whether considering Dieter Rams’s famous book, Ten Principles for Good Design, Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle, Karim Rashid's “Karimanifesto,” or Yves Béhar’s 10 principles for design in the age of AI, there are certainly many influential design experts around the world who have developed their own core philosophy or approach to realizing a world designed for humans by humans. But what are these principles of design really about, and why do famous designers use them? Can the average Fortune 100 company or grassroots brand establish its very own principles of design? The answer to the latter question is, of course, maybe – and it depends. You have to have the right people in place before an innovative process can take shape. There is a method each company should consider for discovering and establishing what these principles of design should look like to those creating products and services within the organization. Your business needs the right person to champion this approach, someone who has both intellectual and emotional intelligence and is endorsed by the Chief Executive Officer. The latter is especially important for providing enough political runway to challenge the status quo and enlist the right cross-functional stakeholders. Empowering your team to use a design strategy process to produce actionable design principles requires extensive collaboration between all key decision makers. The design strategy process itself is the very act of embedding or coding for those who have to scale the insights. This is especially true for designers and innovators at external agencies and large companies with their own design departments. Being part of the process of discovering design principles is even more critical when one is looking to improve a particular offering in a highly constrained, cost-sensitive product development environment, such as the durable goods industry, and other industries that have a high degree of risk when it comes to capitalizing expenses. In such industries, knowing the customer is just as important as knowing the business. The principles of your design should have immediate impact on and long-lasting application for your service, product, accessory, consumable, and/or your consumers’ experiences of the product. Solutions or offerings should be based on design principles, and your cross-functional team should be briefed using a framework that is simple yet memorable. This framework should be representative of the culmination

of research performed, but it should also be easy enough for your organization to implement. There are many frameworks to use; however, there are four consistent variables that come together effectively across all frameworks: features, aesthetics, interaction, and novelty. Considering these four distinct and overlapping elements of your design will help you determine which key performance indicators will help you collect your design research as a group of insights that your cross-functional team – and, in particular, your design department – can leverage. These four standardized areas of discovery are not simply about provoking people to respond; rather, they allow you to take a more elegant approach to understanding the human thought process. The first element, features, is not about what a solution or offering can do for a certain price point. The features of a product or experience should be aligned with what you want to achieve and the tradeoffs you are willing to make; features should be looked at in relation to an absolute set of time and relative effort, meaning that there are certain universal design principles that will always be self-evident. After all, people will always want a good experience, affordable consumables, useful accessories, quality products, and dependable service. The features should lead to the proposed end goal, though figuring out what consumers are willing to pay for each step of the journey is a different article in itself. Starting with an understanding of what people naturally want out of their lives, and for their loved ones, will help build the right lens for creating the most viable features. The intended user isn’t always the intended buyer. The second element is aesthetics. While aesthetics in this context still focuses on how something looks, it’s also about the material science and the excitement one has using the product, especially if your solution is something tangible like an IoT product or the next ground-breaking appliance. This term encompasses how something feels, its finish, the temperature of its materials, the luminous flux and hue of the light emitted from it, the force required to open a particular compartment, the sound it makes, the human factors of a solution, and even the perceived weight of the object. I like to call this the science of achieving the proper aesthetics, or rather, “aesthetical physics.” Today, there are more and more products and solutions that are turning physical encounters into digital experiences, such as online shopping, dating, and, perhaps one day, even virtual babysitting. These too must incorporate art direction that is matched with the appropriate tone and brand to hit certain target segment expectations of how something should look and feel. But the complexity of delivering the right aesthetics for an intuitive experience both physically and digitally overlaps with the third element: interaction.

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Elegant Design. Timeless Sound.

the novelty wears off, the applications fade into the background of normal operations. Ultimately, the elements that make up a foundational design principle are not simply about creating a document to brief your design department or preparing another consultant deliverable. They should instead be viewed as essential to the process of discovering actionable learning to guide the entire product development team, including marketers, engineers, and consultants. Current design strategies should strive to give your cross-functional team the information it needs to evolve the type of services, products, accessories, consumables, and experiences you know your company can achieve. It just takes the right cross-functional leadership to understand how the very principles that guide your design should be designed. So before your company or team starts looking at developing new solutions or creating another product SKU mix, first explore what the features should be, what the appropriate aesthetics are, how the end user would want to interact with the product, and of course, the novel approach that is needed to stand out from the competition. You’ll be on track to create an offering with staying power for years to come. //// Lee Fain is co-head, design strategy at Idea Couture.

Since 1972, Roland has been dedicated to creating the ultimate piano experience. The premiere Roland LX-17’s luxurious tone and expressive touch are faithful to the instrument’s heritage, while its elegant, slim design and Bluetooth connectivity are the perfect musical complement to today’s urban lifestyle. This is the new generation of piano for the new generation of player. PHOTO: BRANDI REDD

Interaction has its own long and documented history within the field of design. However, in the context of discovering your design principles, let’s define interaction as the way in which people intuitively anticipate using the solution or offering being marketed to them. Consumers want interactions that are tied to their own intuition and familiarity with what is being designed or serviced. While this element does have its own design evolution due to regular increases in the complexity of technologies, consumers ultimately still desire simplicity in both the physical and digital worlds. I remember designing my first website a very long time ago using Notepad to write HTML and ImageReady to splice my images. It was a very tedious and time-consuming process, but no matter how much effort I placed into the back-end, it was the front-end (or rather, the user interface) that needed to operate for its audience in a very simplistic manner. The interface needed to match what people expected or had previously experienced, and it had to give sought-after information with the fewest amount of clicks or, nowadays, swipes possible. No matter how political the back-end of any corporate process has become, how supplier-led open innovation efforts are being promoted, or how international the product development team is, the intended user interaction with the offering should always strive to be positive and provide the user with a unique and remarkable experience. You will always see how poor development decisions lead to poor design; it’s self-evident in the customer reviews. The fourth and final element has to do with the novelty of an offering. Not everything new is innovative, and not everything innovative is brand new. The novelty of an offering could simply be the departure it allows from an old way of doing something, which then facilitates a better experience. For example, we used to access the web from cumbersome desktop computers, but we have since expanded to laptops, phones, and watches. More recently, drones began delivering products to our homes rather than a delivery truck showing up at our doors. The novelty of a product or experience is not a standalone specification; rather, it is the sum of its parts. I’ve worked for several major corporations over the past 10 years. The 3M Company, as far as I have seen, has amplified this novelty approach particularly well. Their solutions are based on applying material science thinking within a particular industry, market, or customer solution to a different application or a combination of several previous solutions. There are a ton of subtle innovations that most of us aren’t even aware of. They aren’t all that groundbreaking, but 3M’s ability to promote certain unique and useful applications is perhaps their single biggest core marketing competency. It’s not the ability to do one thing well, but rather, the ability to subtly remind everyone, every day that they exist. That way, when

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Leveraging Design Thinking to Uncover Truths in Healthcare

B Y D R. K AT E S E L L E N A N D D R. T E D W I T E K

Whether one is evaluating or designing optimal approaches to personal or public health, perceptions about how to define and achieve health and wellbeing vary greatly across different people, groups, and organizations, with everyone having different – and even discordant – views. Consider, for example, the debates surrounding Obamacare, or the challenge with addressing NHS budgets. Ideally, in the process of designing and optimizing a health product, service, or system, these different perspectives would all be considered, and the challenges of each stakeholder’s perspective would also be embraced. Identifying, working with, and distilling multiple “truths” should have fruitful results. Design is well positioned to achieve this for the health sector.

Taking these dimensions and applying them to a design-thinking context, private sector ethnographer Sam Ladner proposed the more readily workable shorthand definitions. In developing strategies to work on complex problems in the health sector – particularly those rooted in evidence – one of the authors of this article, Dr. Kate Sellen, developed an application of these dimensions as a design-thinking tool. The four different types of truth regimes can all be practically applied to design thinking in health and wellbeing. Veridical truth is embedded in decades of “the evidence.” While often complicated and confusing, it is essentially rooted in the ability to measure something so that a truth can be told about it. For example, evidence proving the benefits of moderation and attention to input (diet) and output (exercise) supports veridical truth. Governmental truth is revealed by a government’s behavior. For example, a government may implement a soda tax to reduce sugar intake or offer gym membership subsidies for employees. The basis of both offerings is a set of truths held about food manufacturers, health, and the employee as a category. Symbolic truth can be observed in programs like Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, where she used her prominent role to encourage activity and better nutrition through the ritual of storytelling; the mental health charity Heads Together, founded by The Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry; and Chelsea Clinton’s focus on the opiate epidemic through the Clinton Foundation and the concept of the “grand challenge.” Finally, mundane truth falls within the realm of everyday common sense or experience – such as the experience of opiate overdose. In the case of health and wellbeing generally, this might manifest in the idea that one has no time to exercise or to eat food that is not convenient (i.e. pre-prepared). When these potentially conflicting – or possibly converging – versions of truth around health and wellbeing are all considered, we can better understand the problem areas that must be addressed for both designing and communicating solutions.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth How do we differentiate one type of truth from another? First conceived by Michel Foucault over 50 years ago, the concept of a “truth regime” has four dimensions that were explored by Lorna Weir in 2008 as: Veridical Truth Scientifically measured and described Governmental Truth Governing behavior by category Symbolic Truth Ritual, role, and origin story Mundane Truth Everyday common sense

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Healthy Design

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Integrating Truths in Health Challenges: The Opioid Crisis One growing problem area in need of creative solutions is the dependency on synthetic pain relievers, now estimated to affect nearly 2.5 million Americans. According to the World Health Organization, 69,000 or more people across the globe die of overdose and related causes annually. This causes a ripple effect for these individuals’ families and care providers, as well as for the public. How can design thinking begin to address such a devastating and growing crisis? From a veridical perspective, the pharmacology of the opioid-receptor antagonist naloxone has been established, and evidence of its efficacy has existed for over 50 years. In the current crisis, however, the issue is not the effectiveness of the drug, but rather the access to it, knowledge about how to use it in response to overdose, and issues of stigma. These design elements are critical to finding a solution to opioid overdose response. When it comes to governmental truth and opioids, there is a tendency to focus policy and programming on the approval and availability of opiates (to control prescribing behavior) and on the individuals with dependency who fit the category of “the addict.” Consequently, access to information about the potential side effects of using opiates (whether prescribed or not) and about how to protect oneself, one’s loved ones, or one’s peers from the risk of overdose may not reach the wider public. In reality, a waiter or dishwasher who discovers someone overdosing in a public washroom may need similar information and tools as the sibling who makes the same discovery in their home. Symbolic truth about the opiate crisis is often visible via passionate public health professionals and lived-experience advocates who discuss the topic. These individuals use public rituals as platforms for storytelling in order to give people alternative perspectives regarding the problem at hand. For example, Eugenia Oviedo-Joekes, a public health professor from British Columbia, reminds us that opioid addiction is a chronic relapsing disease. She notes that, while we cannot cure diabetes, we can stabilize patients for years; she believes this perception should be accepted with opioid dependency as well. Integrating symbolic truths told by advocates into a design process can change the direction of solutions.

Finally, when it comes to mundane truth, design is well positioned to uncover everyday stories of overdose and the many nuanced factors that drive behavior. How many overdose victims are discovered by friends or family members? Why is there a reluctance to call 911 in these situations? What might happen if a friend has naloxone on them when they discover a crisis? These are, in fact, among the mundane truths uncovered in unbounded mundane storytelling that can be facilitated by design techniques.

The Potential for Design Thinking in Health The concept of the truth regime described here is only one potential framework for placing design thinking at the heart of solutions in the heath sector. There are no simple solutions, but embracing the complexity of problems will unquestionably bring us closer to promoting health and wellbeing. This starts by recognizing and respecting the different truths that exist among multiple stakeholders – including individuals who hold government positions, leaders at major organizations, and leading academics – who set policies or hold symbolic truths about an issue, and have the difficult job of integrating these multiple truths within the everyday experiences that drive behavior in any proposed solution. //// Dr. Kate Sellen is an associate professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University, leader of the university’s Healthcare and Resilient Experience Group, and director of the Design for Health Master’s Program. She was recently engaged by the Design for Health program at OCAD University and St. Michael’s Hospital to look at the experience of opiate overdose. Dr. Ted Witek is professor and senior fellow at the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation (IHPME) at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and Chief Scientific Officer at Innoviva in South San Francisco. He is an advisor to the Design for Health program at OCAD University.

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industry has adapted an incredibly successful model from the 20th century: sports. The word “sports” tumbles down to us from a long and curious etymology. The root word “port” comes from the Latin portāre – meaning “to carry.” It denotes burden, weight, and heaviness. So in the name of freedom, merriment, and games, our ancestors liberated us from the heaviness of portāre with the prefix “dis.” Disportāre: “to remove us from our burdens,” from the heaviness we carry. Toss the phonetic d- away and we get the modern word “sport.” So how did the ancients understand the burdens that weighed them down, those which sports liberated them from? Were they experiencing insecurities, failures to self-actualize, or anxieties around living life to the fullest like us moderns? Not quite. Actually, the ancient Latin word disportāre meant “apart, or away, from business or gravity.” Who hasn’t dreamed of being free of these? Here we have a brand promise for any number of modern lifestyle brands, prefabricated 20 centuries ago and ready for use: Freeing you from the concerns of business and gravity.

From business: Match fixing, gouged ticket prices, the commercial cues that render an experience inauthentic.

How does game design reflect our aspirations? BY VA L DIS SIL IN S

Games speak to the ways we interact with each other and ourselves. We use them to relax, to bond, to challenge ourselves, and to pass time. Like an intimate partner, they, in turn, have much to say about us. They anticipate future cultural aspirations, mirror our present-day anxieties, and tie us to an ever-present drive to escape the world we inherited and inhabit one we’ve built instead. Binding us through rules and rhythms, games are one of the oldest expressions of human culture. So old, in

fact, that for historians like Johan Huizinga, games must have come before culture. For Huizinga, they functioned as a sort of archaic cultural incubator, formalizing social interactions, externalizing their rules, and setting the stage for evermore-complex phenomena like language, law, philosophy, and art to emerge. Today, games are all around us. Mobile, VR, console, paper, or board-based, there’s no shortage of innovative game design going on. But what does all this activity say about the culture we’re building and what’s driving it? While the business models of the last 40 years have treated gaming mostly as a product, the models are increasingly shifting, and experiences that go beyond the game itself are more often being designed. In order to shift successfully, the gaming

ILLUSTRATIONS: JEMUEL DATILES

From gravity: The concerns of the everyday, the snags that stop flow, the limits of the body’s abilities. With the kind of clarity that only an anachronism can bring, the ancient word disportāre crashes into the present anxieties of modern sports fans: commercial inauthenticity and bodily integrity. Yet, despite these escapist anxieties, sports have grown into a bigger business than ever. So big, in fact, that business leaders have begun to seek out new games and ways to grow. Adding an electronic prefix to the ancient Latin compound, the last decade has seen the meteoric rise of eSports, or competitive video gaming. To get a sense of scale, consider that the 2016 League of Legends World Championship finals broadcast to 43 million unique viewers, beating last year’s NBA finals, which sat at 31 million viewers. Along with Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, these giants of the eSports world were retrofitted for league play after gaining a grassroots player following first, tacking a league experience onto the old product-centric model. Last year’s Overwatch, for instance, was launched by Blizzard and modeled on the NFL; it involved team owners, investors, coaches, physical therapists, sponsors, and local cities. Beyond the games themselves, however, exists an entire ecosystem around gaming education. Schools to

train for careers in professional gaming have opened in Japan, high schools in Sweden include gaming in their curriculums, Alibaba is collaborating with the Olympic Council of Asia to bring eSports to the Asia Games, Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Olympic games and is championing the inclusion of eSports, and eSports bars and pop-up shops are opening in cities around the world. Even the shape of buildings is being affected. At SXSW this year, global architecture and design firm Populus unveiled an eSports arena that features high-tech ceilings that morph for different events, an adjacent gaming village with training centers, an outdoor drone race course, and AR and holographic content at the center of the stadium for immersive experiences. This scale of ambition would have been laughable a decade ago, but the fact that designs like this have traction is a testament to the speed of change in the industry. The thing is, all of this has happened before. From the 19th to 20th century, sports underwent a process of rationalization, transforming from local, communal activities based on participation to structured and tiered phenomena based on spectatorship and differentiated by class. This transformation, traced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, showed how different socioeconomic groups expressed their desires and aspirations through the lens of sports. For the working classes, spectatorship became the norm. Being unable to participate, they became spectators of the virtuosic abilities of professional players, projecting onto them a mix of meritocratic wish fulfillment and lottery-like hope. The middle classes, meanwhile, prepared for the grueling climb up the socioeconomic ladder by submitting themselves to the masochistic demands of industrial machinery repurposed to burn calories: gyms. The elites, on the other hand, self-sorted into activities with high costs of entry, like polo, golf, and skiing, enabling them to cement in-group vernaculars and behavioral norms. We don’t have to take Bourdieu’s class analysis as entirely deterministic to have fun with it. Today’s eSports landscape, instead of organizing itself over the course of 2 centuries, has taken an accelerated 20 years to go from fringe to maturation. Bourdieu’s three-tiered analysis could even, with a degree of facetiousness, be applied to game analogs today. Toward the bottom of the social system are groups like those highlighted in a 2017 Princeton study, which demonstrated that increased time spent video gaming mirrored precisely the drop in labor time participation by young males during the last decade. The increasingly mainstream phenomenon of eSports is taking hold. Fast-twitch reactions, metrics based on clicks-per-minute, displays

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with a future that demands an abstract ability to perceive and manipulate the world in computational ways. For those who can’t, but who are positioned to win in that world nonetheless, there’s the realization that building the mechanics of the machine might be less relevant than the ability to pragmatically collaborate with the outputs of it. Putting it to use is what matters. The games we design and play speak to a whole range of knotty issues that tie the present to the future. Routing them through the lens of automation is just one angle. But given the digital transformation our culture is undergoing, games provide a concentrated glimpse of the social and psychological impacts of tomorrow’s practices. Using patterns from the past, we can project signals from the present to illuminate a world that’s not quite visible yet. Doing so can help us hone in on contemporary anxieties, give contour to future aspirations, and remind us of age-old driving forces that will, together, shape the future. ////

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+ Design Exchange President & CEO, Shauna Levy

Earlier this year, Rogers Communications — a Canadian-grown media powerhouse — declared its commitment to building a better future through a major partnership with EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation & Technology. Produced by Design Exchange, the inaugural festival was a celebration of the people and projects that are shaping our world for the better, for everyone.

Valdis Silins is a senior foresight analyst at Idea Couture.

In partnership with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the expo presented a unique opportunity for Rogers to share its future-forward corporate social responsibility story with an international audience of dreamers, doers, and disruptors.

EDIT’s focus on building a better future for all aligns perfectly with Ted Roger’s strong belief that the “best is yet to come.” We saw EDIT as the ideal canvas for us to build upon this future forward narrative and touch the hearts and minds of all those who visit.

“We see technology as a central pillar to finding new ways to overcome global challenges,” Rogers VP Sponsorship & Experiences Nigel Scott explains. Recently, Scott caught up with Design Exchange President and CEO Shauna Levy to discuss the importance of giving back to the community, the promising future of his brand, and why the best is yet to come.

WHY SHOULD OTHER BRANDS GET INVOLVED WITH UNDERTAKINGS LIKE EDIT? Brands looking to connect with consumers through inspirational and innovative thinking should strongly consider supporting events like EDIT. They are a team of visionaries who enjoy creating never-been-donebefore activations that will enhance your brand and provide memorable consumer experiences.

LEVY: Nowadays, it’s becoming increasingly more

common for brands to integrate their corporate social responsibility model directly into their overall business strategy. How is this happening at Rogers?

// Games provide a concentrated glimpse of the social and psychological impacts of tomorrow’s practices. //

SCOTT: Being a good corporate citizen is at the heart of our business. We are investing in our economy, environment, community, and employees to build a strong Canadian growth company. We believe that we have an obligation to give back to the communities in which we live and work. WHY DID YOUR TEAM DECIDE TO JOIN THE EDIT COMMUNITY? The team at EDIT are visionaries and understand how design, technology and innovation will shape the future. For Rogers, technology and innovation are at the core of our brand’s DNA.

ILLUSTRATIONS: JEMUEL DATILES

of information virtuosity that burn through working memory, and parallel tasks dwarf anything our ancestral environments might have thrown at us. Like John Henry racing against the steam engine, these eSports players burn through energy sodas and LCD-seared retinas in a race against the competition. In the middle class, the comparative placidity of aspirational families shields the Minecraft generation. Building increasingly complex patterns from simple building blocks, the free form, infinite game of Minecraft trains youngsters in the basics of logic gates and chip circuitry. Rather than the thrill of competition, Minecraft sets each player against themselves and their own mental limits. With a game design that mirrors the processes of real-world programming, Minecraft replaces the gyms of Bourdieu’s yesteryear, training individuals’ brains for an economy based on cognitive work. The thinking behind it is this: Master computational thinking, and you’ll always be able to find work in the 21st century. Meanwhile, at the top, socializing an upper class argot is replaced by learning how to collaborate with AI. Garry Kasparov’s championing of a form of chess called “freestyle chess,” in which human players collaborate with AI partners to beat both human players and AI players alone, signals a rising need to learn and master new techniques for algorithmic collaboration through games. Outward cues of in-group belonging are replaced by individual mastery of the processes required to achieve superhuman efficiency. You are only as much as you can pack into your automated schedule. So where does that leave us? From the etymological roots of “sport,” we’re reminded of the perennial desire to escape the burdens of the world we inherited. Accelerated anxieties like these abound in our digital gaming culture, acutely embodied in the figure of the hikikomori of Japan, young men who’ve withdrawn entirely into the world of gaming and other media. Entwined with questions of labor and participation, eSports function as competitive outlets, assuring us that the future won’t be entirely isolating. At the same time, as game after game is conquered by AI, we’re left wondering about the role of the human. For the players of Minecraft, the open-ended world of creative tinkering provides an exit. But bound up with this is the expectation of intense cognitive training in new forms of computational thinking. As Bourdieu reminds us, our behavioral drives are routed through imagined social possibilities. Not everyone can keep up

A DEBRIEF ON THE INAUGURAL EDIT Rogers VP Sponsorship & Experiences, Nigel Scott

HOW WILL ROGERS SHAPE OUR FUTURE FOR THE BETTER? Rogers aspires to build a brilliant digital

future for Canadians from coast-to-coast. We do this by investing in our products and services, our communities, and our economy to ensure that no one is left behind in the digital economy. A prime example of this can be seen in our Connected for Success program, which provides aﬀordable high-speed internet to Canadians living in non-profit housing. Since launching in 2013, Connected for Success has partnered with more than 165 non-profit housing providers across Rogers’ cable footprint, with more than 14,500 Canadian households participating in the program. HEAR MORE FROM THE VISIONARIES DESIGNING OUR FUTURE AT EDITDX.ORG/PODCAST.

PRESENTING PA R T N E R

EXPO FOR DESIGN, INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY

P R O D U C E D BY

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B Y I D R I S M O O T E E, WITH BILL BUXTON

Remote controls were borne out of necessity. There was an unmet need that emerged from having to get up and walk to the TV to switch channels or adjust the volume. This resulted in the first wired remote intended to control a television, developed by Zenith Radio Corporation in the 1950s. It was called “Lazy Bones.” A wireless remote control, the “Flashmatic,” was then developed in 1955 by Eugene Polley. Now, remote controls are everywhere. We have multiple remotes scattered around the house, and each one can be programmed to do a thousand things – yet no one bothers to actually make the most of them. It has come to the point that we’re more inclined to aimlessly press buttons in the hopes that something will happen, than to actually learn their functions. In short, the remote is arguably one of the most useful tools we have, but with the most useless features. It holds a well-deserved spot among the top 10 most terribly designed objects. The opposite of the remote is the watch: put on any model and it tells the time. The problem with the remote, is that it requires the user to learn how to use each individual model all over again, as there are few common features across models. Think about how many buttons you never actually use. Next thing you know, they will be adding Like, Skip, Share, Bookmark, and Search buttons (and goodness knows what else) to the mix – but only on certain models, of course. Imagine if every laptop had a different keyboard design; it wouldn’t make for a great experience. On-screen user interfaces are not a good solution either, which means that finding a remote that is

intuitive to use, easy on the eyes, aesthetically elegant, and universally adaptable feels impossible. It would be ideal if Android took over and designed a universal remote for all appliances in the world. These days, smartphones are taking over as the remote controls in our lives, with many apps dedicated to different needs, from regulating home appliances and temperatures, to flying a drone and managing a portfolio of stocks. The smartphone has become the king of remote controls. But the remote had far more humble beginnings. In the late 1800s, long before the development of the Lazy Bones or Flashmatic models, Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla created one of the world's first wireless remote controls. The device could be used to control a range of mechanical contraptions; Tesla called this system a “teleautomaton.” When he demonstrated this new innovation, Tesla used a miniature boat controlled by radio waves. A small metal antenna attached to the boat could receive one radio frequency, allowing Tesla to send signals using a box – his version of a remote control – equipped with a lever and a telegraph key (originally designed to send Morse code signals). The signals generated from this box shifted electrical contacts aboard the boat, which, in turn, adjusted settings for the rudder and propeller, allowing the operator to control the boat's motion. Tesla didn’t go very far with the technology – but others did. Bill Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, has written an interesting commentary on the design of the remote control and provides a design researcher’s view of the device by talking about the evolution of his favorite remote control design.

PHOTO: BILL BUXTON

Ripe for Reinvention: The Story of the Remote Control

Humble Beginnings

The Future of the Remote Control

The remote control seems to influence far more than our appliances – including our behavior. Just consider who tends to hold the remote in a family and the conventions around seizing said remote from that person. In terms of its invention, the remote control signifies what it means to be “first” at something. If an idea has already been done, for example, all you need to do is add another adjective; you may not have created the first wireless remote control, but you could still create the first portable TV, or the first color TV. Sometimes, history tells a good story. Think way, way back to 2007 and the launch of the iPhone. Other than a few scientists, nobody had heard of, much less seen, interactive screens that could simultaneously sense more than one touch. Then, after the iPhone’s launch, multi-touch screens started popping up everywhere. The iPhone seemingly changed everything. But the iPhone certainly wasn’t the first phone model to make waves. In the 1930s, long before Apple and its iPhone were conceived, the Western Electric Model 302 rotary dial phone was introduced. It also changed everything. And, just as the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone to have a touchscreen (that was the IBM Simon), the Model 302 wasn’t the first phone with a dial – but it was the first to get it right in terms of timing and integration. And it was as cool in the late 1930s as the iPhone was in 2007. An even better example, though, is the Philco Mystery Control – the first wireless remote control for a radio, first introduced in 1939. As with car radios today, this radio had numbered pre-set stations. But instead of pushing a button, the user had to dial a pre-set number. You could use the dial to change the volume, turn the radio on and off, or switch sources between the radio and the record player. And for those who still remember stacking records, dialing a specified number would cause the next record stacked on the spindle to drop down and start playing when you got bored of the current one. But perhaps one of the best (unintended) “features” of the Mystery Control was its bulk. Nobody was going to accidentally walk out of the room with it, and it certainly wasn’t going to get lost behind the sofa cushions!

Let’s be honest: Despite its history, the remote control is hardly a finished product. While it has come a long way from the Philco Mystery Control and the Flashmatic, the remote control hasn’t made too many leaps and bounds in the last few decades. Meanwhile, designers continue to obsess over creating something new, not realizing that the very thing requiring that level of attention has been sitting on our coffee tables for decades, untouched and unimproved. So why haven’t we improved upon the dated design of the remote control? Here are a few questions to consider:

// The remote control sits in front of us all day long, an opportunity staring us in the face. But we never try to redesign the products just screaming for an overhaul; instead, we choose to focus on creating yet another new thing that we won’t need. //

/ The first remote control, which was created by Tesla over 100 years ago, was based on simple unmet needs, and it is not yet obsolete. But will it survive another 100 years, like other ubiquitous tools such as forks and spoons or eyeglasses? / Most products will become standardized over the years, as this makes it easier for manufacturers and customers to produce and use them. So, why has there been so much hesitation to adopt a universal remote control? / The usability of remote controls is flawed, with each device often requiring many hours of learning to understand its full functionality. Even if one invests the time to learn, it’s difficult to retain this knowledge when each new remote requires the same learning curve. Why can’t we apply the usability of a QWERTY keyboard? We learn it once, and then we can always use it, no matter which device we are typing on. / A super remote that is upgradable is a simple idea that could include other functions, like a touchscreen or home security device – yet no one has explored this. If combining a clock with a radio results in an alarm clock, then what would happen if a remote control were paired something else equal to it? An innovative new product, perhaps? The remote control sits in front of us all day long, an opportunity staring us in the face. But we never try to redesign the products just screaming for an overhaul; instead, we choose to focus on creating yet another new thing that we won’t need. If you want to invent something new, why not try the remote control? After all, it hasn’t been reinvented for the last 100 years. //// Bill Buxton is a computer scientist and designer, and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Idris Mootee is Global CEO of Idea Couture.

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Taking a Critical Approach

B Y T O M B A R K E R, M A R YA M N A B AV I, A N D UDIT VIR A

Speculative design and design fiction take a critical approach to design; they help us to question the status quo and challenge our assumptions and preconceptions. Although an understanding of these practices has permeated the design community, much of this style of work remains tucked away in academic institutions and specialized design studios. On the rare occasions that speculative design work reaches a broader audience, it is usually dystopian and lacks the diversity of thought that we should expect from the discipline. It’s no surprise then that companies have ignored these provocative design disciplines, believing that they don’t add value to their core business. What we’re left with is a narrow view of the future that’s missing the values, hopes, and dreams of the many voices that make up our present. Evidence of our insular view of the future is quite apparent in the design of technology products today and even more so in the media that consumer electronic behemoths produce. Silicon Valley has sold us visions of an unblemished techno-utopia where slick, artificially intelligent machines solve all of our human problems before we even know what they are. But this optimism for the future is unrealistic and discounts the nuances, complexities, and

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

From Designing Science Fiction to Experiencing Our Future

unalterable messiness of human life. Is it not time to bring in fresh and varied perspectives to question the assumptions inherent to the products we build? This is not to say that, over the past century, speculative design hasn’t increasingly inspired executives to think outside of their traditional businesses and to consider current impossibilities as near-future goals. In fact, even the technology plutocrats – Gates, Musk, and Bezos – have used their internet- and softwarederived wealth to fund fantasies and build space rockets, fast electric cars, and hearables. Although most business practitioners are aware that design can bring the future to life, our conceptions of these futures are typically exceedingly dystopian, focused on execution, and/or technology-centric; speculative futures thinking is not being used to its full potential. Instead of always focusing on the end goal and the product that’s being created, perhaps we should shift our thinking around speculative design and use it instead to help us better experience the future and the implications of our imaginations. Of course, this would be a significant change, especially for those who have long enjoyed the freedom of imagining futures without grounding their speculations on constraints and consequences. But this new approach works in tandem with the shift in our culture from the “information age” to the “experience age.” It also brings with it a tremendous opportunity for systematic thinking, allowing for the consideration of how each speculation impacts other scenarios and the increasingly tight meshing between corporate goals, culture, and social responsibility. If we are able to shift away from pessimistic science fiction and to leverage speculative design to experience our future, we can identify strategic opportunities in the “experience age” and build durable concepts that counter the alluring – but ultimately destructive – post-truth fantasy. In the past, technology-led companies marched on unchallenged, and there was no reason to question where they were going. After all, they built amazing creations: sleek computers that fit in the palm of people’s hands, biotechnologies that could birth and alter life, rockets that could take us to the moon and back – inventions that inspired generations and drove both economic and social progress. However, the new ways we interact with and experience different social, economic, political, and environmental systems have led to an unforeseen and sometimes counterintuitive interconnectedness. Even web applications that were once considered simple tools now have far-reaching political and societal implications. A few years ago, Facebook was a communication platform for friends and family to connect. However, this past year we’ve seen Facebook subverted into a formidable weapon used by political agents to establish and dislodge narratives. This interconnectedness is common across industries and must be factored in when developing product strategies. It’s too risky to design products without thinking through the different futures they may have to weather. Uber was developed so drivers with cars could connect with passengers looking for a ride. This seemingly straightforward technological platform has been a provocateur for a range of questions about trust, accountability, and the future of work. A few years ago, when an Uber rider in India was sexually assaulted, the press raised concerns about Uber’s responsibility for its customers’ safety. Since then, Uber has come under fire for other reasons as well. In the West, we’ve seen drawn out public debates about whether Uber signals the beginning of a “gig economy,” introducing precarious working conditions for its drivers. One can only wonder whether Uber employees and investors anticipated any of these issues while the Uber concept was still in its early

stages. Could more diversity of thought in those early boardroom meetings have produced a more robust product? The challenge with speculative design and design fiction is that, too often, they are thought of as tools for creative entertainment. Many times, the fictions they produce take an uncomfortable, or even pessimistic, position that is unwelcome in business. In contrast with technology executives who continue to tell us how the latest smart gadget will transform humanity, critical design work can sometimes paint a bleak picture of a technologically-driven world devoid of purpose, privacy, and dignity. How can we take a middle path where we balance the half-baked optimism so common in the innovation world with the pessimism of speculative designers? //// We’d like to leave you with some ideas for a way forward where we balance speculative design with execution. Let’s start by thinking of the future as a continuum ranging from dystopian to utopian. Speculative design principles cannot only help us identify what the worst and best scenarios are, but they are also important dimensions we should be considering. In Uber’s case, for example, the dimensions could have been trust, safety, quality of drivers, reaction from customers, environmental impact, and so on. Considering each dimension, we can identify the best- and worst-case scenarios. For the trust dimension, one can imagine the best-case scenario of a future where both drivers and riders don’t think twice before calling an Uber, or the worst-case scenario where Uber is a scary alternative to other transit options. We could also start identifying what would cause us to reach each of these future states. The end goal of this exercise is to create design rules that can help us occupy a stable equilibrium state in the system that is tolerable, or even desired. Here are some steps for following a process that can be repurposed for the design of any product: 1/ Identify dimensions to consider while designing. 2/ Understand if and how these dimensions are related. 3/ Brainstorm best- and worst-case scenarios around each of these dimensions. 4/ Identify where you would like to reside within the system, where you could tolerate being, and where you could recover from. 5/ Ideate around the design rules that will let you live in an equilibrium state that is most closely aligned with the best-case scenario. Speculative design requires a multidisciplinary approach; without this, it risks falling into the same trap as techno-centric or other biased design practices. By bringing a diverse set of voices from various disciplines and cultural backgrounds, businesses can mitigate against the risk of tunnel vision. By engaging various stakeholders – who may have conflicting expectations and needs – and considering various business realities, executives can leverage speculative design to their benefit. //// Tom Barker is VP, Digital at Six Trends Inc. and the former Graduate Program Director of Digital Futures at OCAD University. Maryam Nabavi is VP, IC/ things at Idea Couture. Udit Vira is an electromechanical designer at Idea Couture.

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Aligning Design With Emerging Needs

B Y D R. A N D Y H I N E S

Designers seeking to develop innovative design offerings are continually challenged to understand how customer preferences are changing. If only it were as simple as asking customers what they will need in the future! The truth is, they don’t know either. Thus, designers must look for clues about future customer preferences. As the Global Trends Manager with Kellogg Company back in the 1990s, I was introduced to the idea that long-term shifts in individual values can provide useful insight into changing customer preferences, an idea I detailed in the book ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape. In particular, value shifts provide insight into emerging customer needs. This article describes five emerging needs explored in ConsumerShift, as well as the implications these needs have for designers’ development of future-friendly offerings.

The descriptor “emerging” was carefully chosen to signify that these needs are already appearing in customer life to some degree today and will become increasingly important in the future. The five emerging customer needs are: / Keeping It Real Customers prefer the straight story. / The [Relentless] Pursuit of Happiness Customers want to take responsibility for their own wellbeing. / Community First Customers prefer local products, services, and sources. / We [Really] Are the World Customers feel responsible for the wellbeing of the planet. / Glass Houses Customers believe everyone is watching them.

Keeping It Real

The [Relentless] Pursuit of Happiness

Community First

The keyword for understanding this need is authenticity. Customers are asking organizations to give it to them straight and trust them to be able to handle the truth. They are rejecting any paternalistic sugarcoating or “for your own good” mentality. They want to be treated as intelligent adults and as equals – they do not want to be managed. This new customer attitude is a reaction to an overly managed world. “Delighting the customer” has gone to an extreme. Management of customer experiences has become increasingly sophisticated, with every aspect of the customer experience now being micromanaged. Customers sense this control and feel that they are constantly being manipulated. They want it to stop.

Customers are increasingly rethinking the purpose of their lives. The pursuit of happiness is a purpose shared by many; it reflects the growing range of choices enjoyed by those with relative economic security. This search for purpose is often accompanied by a sense of angst. Many experience a sense of emptiness after pursuing material prosperity, which results in them calling the meaning of their lives into question. Happiness becomes something that has to be achieved – it does not necessarily arrive on its own. The pursuit of happiness often involves helping others and working to benefit the community. It may also involve faith in a higher power; however, this conception is often derived from multiple sources rather than from a single belief system.

Implications for Designers:

/ Do the homework to find out what authenticity is in a given context. Be aware of the history, origins, materials, and handling of potential offerings.

/ Consider how offerings fit customers’ larger lifestyles and values; consider also how a product or service can serve customers’ sense of purpose.

Customer preferences are shifting from large- to small-scale and from massproduction to custom-made products and services. This reflects the sense customers have that life has gotten too complex, too impersonal, and that it moves too fast. As people seek to reconnect, this feeling of depersonalization is driving the move toward a renewed interest in community. Customers are rejecting the frenetic pace of modern life and looking to reconnect with their community. This desire for connection manifests in both the physical and the virtual worlds. Customers question why they don’t know their neighbors or even the mayor. They are looking for ways to get involved with what’s going on directly around them, as this helps to provide security in what is seen as an increasingly chaotic world. The explosion of Facebook and other social networking sites is evidence of how the virtual world can serve as a mechanism for connection.

/ Create warts-and-all offerings. The authenticity of such offerings may be more appealing than a perfect offering.

/ Help customers help themselves. This principle is reflected in the co-creation trend, in which customers are provided with tools, templates, and advice and left to do the rest themselves.

Implications for Designers: / Tap into locally produced offerings to provide customers an opportunity to “vote with their dollars.” / Be active in both physical and virtual networks and use these networks as sources of advice, referrals, or even co-created crowdsourcing.

// Customers will expect designers to be aligned with them, to understand them, and to relate to them. //

CAN DESIGN CREATE A MORE RESILIENT WORLD Change begins with a question.

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What will you ask? We [Really] Are the World

Glass Houses

Going Forward

An interesting paradox can be seen in the fact that the emerging concern for the local has not been at the expense of the global. Global communications networks now offer people a means to express and act on feelings of global responsibility or planetary consciousness. Personal connections to distant problems are more easily maintained, and the options for action have increased as well. It has become much easier for everyday citizens to act on these values than ever before, resulting in a greater customer interest to provide help both locally and globally to those in need.

More customers are becoming activists with aggressive tendencies. They are intolerant of behavior they deem wrong and are not afraid to let the offender, or any interested party, know about it. They feel they are not to be trifled with and that their values and beliefs are important and need to be respected. These customers are watching organizations’ activities – all the time. They are usually savvy users of technology and experts in the world of information, and they use that knowledge to support their various causes. The keyword behind this principle is accountability: It won’t always be pleasant, and it won’t always be fair. Designers will need to stay consistent and true. Propaganda, message control, and other such tools will only get organizations into trouble. Telling the truth will earn respect and credibility that will be appreciated and rewarded over the long haul.

By considering these five emerging needs, which are based on long-term value shifts, designers can better serve an emerging breed of customers looking for more from their purchases. Customers will expect designers to be aligned with them, to understand them, and to relate to them. While these emerging needs are important to consider, current needs will continue to characterize the majority of offerings. While the emerging needs described above are sitting at the leading edge of change today, they will become increasingly mainstream over the next decade. Understanding and embracing the emergence of these needs will provide designers the insight they need to develop their designs. ////

Implications for Designers: / Be conscious of the ramifications of designs and offerings that go beyond national borders, and look for ways to demonstrate a genuine concern for planetary welfare as well as a willingness to act on that concern. / Consider how a design or product adds to the common welfare, as well as how that aspect of the offering can be clearly communicated.

Implications for Designers: / Adopt transparent, open, and collaborative approaches; share information about how the design was derived, or at least provide access to that information. / Position your company as a trusted partner to help customers navigate through what they see as a complicated and even insecure future. They will appreciate partners who are willing to admit faults and mistakes, which they will see as a sign of good faith.

Dr. Andy Hines is program coordinator and assistant professor at the University of Houston’s graduate program in foresight.

Students at Parsons School of Design know that the right question can change everything. That’s why you’ll work with peers and industry partners in NYC to improve society through rigorous inquiry and design innovation. At the only design school within a comprehensive university—The New School—you’ll collaborate across disciplines to create a more just, more beautiful, better-designed world. Come join a new generation of artists. GRADUATE FIELDS OF STUDY Architecture Communication Design Curatorial Studies Data Visualization Design and Technology Design Studies Fashion Design Fashion Studies Fine Arts Industrial Design Interior Design Lighting Design Strategic Design and Management Transdisciplinary Design Urban Ecologies and Urban Practice Discover more at newschool.edu/parsons Photo by Martin Seck / Equal Opportunity Institution

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Designing Enhanced Cultures of Innovation

Taking the Plunge

Enabling Organizations to Optimize Innovation Capabilities in an Intentional and Evidence-Based Way

D R. E I TA N B U C H A LT E R A N D D R. D A N I E L M A I

How can large, complex organizations ensure they receive the best possible return from their investment in innovation? They have to develop a culture of innovation that is driven by their overarching business objectives. This business challenge is becoming more and more critical as the emphasis that companies place on innovation continues to grow, with an increasing number of CEOs citing their support of innovation as critical to their organization’s future growth. But what is a culture of innovation, and why is an intentional approach to designing such a thing even important? From an anthropological perspective, the phrase “culture of innovation” is collective; it describes the social, material, and psychological environments within which humans innovate. A culture of innovation is what comes from a group of people working together to think beyond their resources and to make new things happen. Taking a human-centered approach to understanding – and subsequently enhancing – a culture of innovation empowers senior business leaders to ground themselves in evidence when launching effective innovation initiatives. To understand their existing culture of innovation, they must ask questions like: / How do their employees experience innovation? / What kinds of habits and practices enhance or diminish the range of innovative behaviors that exist across the business? / Where is the culture of innovation fit for purpose, where isn’t it, and what are the key opportunities to align innovation behaviors with what the organization needs in order to flourish?

Uncovering a Culture of Innovation With Ethnography To understand different cultures of innovation, it is best to engage the expertise of professionals who specialize in deciphering the distinctive, humancentered nuances that make each organization different: that is, organizational ethnographers. It is within the domain of organizational ethnographers to help C-suites understand their organizations’ current culture of innovation and how it can grow into the future. These experts aim to design new evidencebased programs that actively facilitate the complex network of factors affecting the development of ideas leading to innovation. Exploring an organization’s culture of innovation, organizational ethnographers investigate things like R&D engineers’ habits and practices; employees’ physical environments; individuals’ and groups’ ingrained values and beliefs; and even the organization’s wider policies, such as incentive structures. Researchers can learn about such factors by observing people, exploring their individual stories, and building out a landscape of their collective experiences. By collating this diverse information, researchers can better understand and articulate an organization’s specific culture of innovation. Addressing these (and other) foundational questions will eventually enable senior leaders within large organizations to make intentional, evidence-based decisions about how they can design an enhanced culture of innovation that is right for them. We have set out an approach that innovationfocused companies can adopt in order to design an organizational culture that actively facilitates the kind of innovation they need. It highlights the importance of utilizing anthropological expertise in ways that enable organizations to build in-depth understanding around the cultural (and other) factors that affect innovation.

When large organizations decide that innovation will play a leading role in their future, they must begin by making a significant financial commitment to their innovation function. Such investment is frequently followed by the formation of new structures and internal processes intended to facilitate the development of new ideas. While such a move is undoubtedly important, it needs to be carefully planned and executed in an evidence-based way. Failure to do this properly heightens the risk of ending up with a suboptimal innovation initiative that doesn’t deliver the expected ROI. It is therefore critical for senior leaders, before attempting to design an enhanced culture of innovation, to ask: / How can we build a body of evidence to drive our vision for a culture of innovation that unlocks the greater potential promised by our investment in innovation?

Optimizing a Culture of Innovation: An Anthropological Approach Taking an anthropological approach to addressing the challenge of how an organization might optimize its culture of innovation involves placing people at the center of study. In practice, this usually means undertaking three key phases of work:

This approach involves looking beyond organizational charts, strategic road maps, formalized processes, and numbers alone. If a company wants to actively facilitate their culture of innovation, it is vital that their leadership understands the company’s culture for what it is: a complex social formation and system of meaning that is largely shaped by people. Organizational ethnographers discover the factors that influence people’s corporate lives within an organization. While employees’ ways of thinking and doing are partly guided by formal rules, official strategies, processes, and hierarchies, the day-to-day activities of an organization come from a host of informal behaviors, beliefs, values, and patterns of communication. These data points are evaluated according to the following robust conceptual framework:

Dimensions of Anthropological Exploration

Psychological Dimension The different ways that ideas are able to flow through an organization. / Values / Beliefs / Ingrained Rules / Patterns of Thinking / Images of Self-Perception Organizational Culture

Social Dimension Interhuman aspects that affect how people relate to and work with each other. / Social Groups / Social Structures & Informal Hierarchies / Informal Behaviors & Working Practices / Social Interactions & Communication

Material Dimension Physically tangible components that manifest in the workplace. / Infrastructure & IT / Media & Documents / Artifacts / Corporate Architecture

1/ Mapping the current innovation landscape 2/ Identifying key opportunities for optimization 3/ Developing an implementation plan Ultimately, an anthropological approach to identifying and refining an organization’s culture of innovation is about decoding the cultural and structural workings of that organization; it is about understanding how events, behaviors, and interactions are experienced in people’s everyday reality.

Traditional Management Consulting Lens

Organizational Structure Official framework that formalizes how employees are meant to work. / Organization’s Chart Descriptors / Codified Rules / Official Strategies & Roadmaps / Reporting Schemes / Jobs Budget & Staffing Plans / Official Hierarchies

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Dimensions of Anthropological Exploration Phase 1: Map the Current Innovation Landscape

Phase 2: Identify Key Opportunities for Enhancing a Culture of Innovation

Phase 3: Develop an Implementation Plan

In order to map the innovation landscape of an organization, the interrelated dimensions of the organization’s culture – from its people to its formal structures – must be explored. To do this, organizational ethnographers immerse themselves in the spaces and places where employees engage and experience their (working) lives. Such an approach typically includes a set of rigorous and well-established anthropological methods. These include:

Phase 2 leverages the insights captured and developed in Phase 1 in order to identify key opportunities for enhancing a culture of innovation. The insights drawn from an organization’s culture of innovation drive the development of key opportunities for enhancement. Such opportunity areas could include people’s attitudes toward trust, risk, or even their relationship with failure. Each opportunity area is developed a step further in order to uncover what trust, risk, and failure mean from the perspectives of individuals, teams, the organization, and even the sector as a whole. The key outcome from this phase is a suite of prioritized opportunities for enhancing a culture of innovation.

Finally, each of the prioritized opportunity areas needs to be developed into actionable, evidence-based implementation plans designed in ways that will matter to people. Importantly, a successful implementation plan will involve the fusion of three key elements:

/ Observing employees’ daily lives inside the organization over a period of weeks / Shadowing individual employees in key roles in order to explore their working practices, routines, interactions, and typical behaviors

/ Human insights that express the cultural factors affecting an organization’s ability to innovate / An organization’s core business objectives, as well as its wider vision / Industry expertise into the best practices associated with the active facilitation of innovation processes

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/ Engaging in informal office floor conversations, including ad hoc water cooler conversations, to capture off-the-record views and anecdotes about the company / Completing semi-structured one-on-one and group interviews with a broad variety of organization members across different units, sites, and levels / Conducting expert interviews with key stakeholders and decision makers to learn about previous strategies and their implementation / Analyzing documents and media detailing HR and internal communication strategies, onboarding materials, intranet content, and internal communiqués to capture the “official” story an organization tells about itself The ethnographers then collate and analyze the data collected in this initial phase in order to develop deep human insights that highlight the key factors that affect an organization’s culture of innovation.

So What? It is a mistake to assume that every organization needs the same kind of innovation. More innovation isn’t always better, nor is it necessarily what an organization needs in order to succeed. Furthermore, it is equally wrong to automatically parachute one organization’s bespoke strategy for enhancing its culture of innovation into another – when it comes to innovation, one size does not fit all. However, if you are part of an organization that relies on the sustained output of an innovative community of employees, it is a bigger mistake – and perhaps even negligent – to overlook the factors that affect how your organization develops ideas (i.e. how it innovates). Instead, it is through understanding the foundational landscape of innovation within an organization that a company’s C-Suite can assert their active facilitation of the kind of innovation that aligns with their business needs. This, for example, could mean developing pioneering incentive structures, devising new project funding mechanisms, or establishing more emotive communication structures. Whatever the eventual outcome, the anthropological approach to understanding innovation enables an organization to make key decisions for enhancing its culture of innovation based on evidence. To design successful enhancements of a culture of innovation, an organization’s leaders must understand how people actually innovate within it – as opposed to how they might like them to. //// Dr. Eitan Buchalter is a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. Dr. Daniel Mai is a resident ethnographer at Idea Couture.

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Designing Our Futures in 2025 B Y D R. PA U L H A R T L E Y AND IDRIS MOOTEE

If you are designing the future, we’d like to help. Whether you are preparing for your next big keynote or board presentation, or simply want to test your assumptions to make sure you are making the right decision, this short read will provide you with the basis from which to develop your own scenarios with more confidence. We crafted a few possible visions of the future to get you started. We have tried to highlight one possible version of the future in several important areas. We also introduce one unintended consequence for each scenario to help you understand the problem from a design thinking perspective. But this is only a place to start – there is much more to explore.

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In 2025, service robots will begin to share our space. Long a promise of science fiction, simple service robots will be filling small roles in both the home and in public. While they will not be the attentive robot butlers or sassy maids we were promised, they will be humble, functional additions to our households and public spaces. They will impact the nature of work and leisure, but they will not yet be a major threat to workers and their jobs. These robots will still be limited by the massively complex nature of the “real world,” and they will be limited to dedicated tasks. They will, however, cease to be a threat to your cat’s health and wellbeing, something that today’s robot vacuum cleaners cannot promise. An unintended consequence: Humans and robots will struggle to define what’s considered their own space and, as a result, massive reprogramming will be needed to make sure robots respect an individual’s space.

In 2025, the way we share will shift. We already share cars, accommodations, and equipment. But soon we will prefer to share them communally rather than rent them from businesses. Communal ownership will continue to grow as an alternative to unregulated services, providing access to resources that are currently economically disadvantageous to communities outside of major cities. Additionally, the kinds of things that will be held communally will change, as smaller, seldom-used items will be shared by people living in apartment buildings and condos. An unintended consequence: The idea of ownership will shift as houses and cars become too expensive to own outright. Luxury items will move into a model where no single individual owns them independently.

In 2025, machine learning will saturate our lives in the most boring way. The promise of AI has always been to provide novel, flexible, contextually aware solutions for existing problems. Machine learning will lay the groundwork for tackling a large number of very mundane problems, from home lighting systems to control systems for existing devices. It will become a commonplace add-on to things we currently use in our daily lives, and it will improve user experiences in every area that technology typically penetrates. However, its ubiquity will push it into the background and it will become part of the tapestry of our already technologically saturated lives. An unintended consequence: We will start to realize that AI is working with a lot of biases when it consumes data from a mostly developed world. This will, as a result, cause the entire system to behave in a way that prioritizes the values of one group of people over another. The parts of the world that are less connected or not connected will be shut out of the dialogue of what technology can and should be doing for individuals.

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In 2025, successors to the CRISPR gene-editing technology will make it possible to engineer the biological world.

In 2025, the world will be blanketed with 100 billion internet-enabled objects that connect countless sensors, processes, and people.

Our relationship with the biological world will shift as we experiment with a variety of possibilities, ranging from mosquitos with immune-boosting bites to humans with inborn resistance to common degenerative processes. Countries with more permissive values around augmentation will enthusiastically embrace the potential for gene editing, subjecting the rest of the world to highly unanticipated externalities caused by second- and third-order changes.

The ocean of data created by the Internet of Everything will produce $20T in new value. Privacy in this world will be a problematic, somewhat antiquated notion, since it will mean keeping your actions away from the prying eyes of not just people, but displays, streetlights, and clothing.

An unintended consequence: Because technology is moving faster than our social understanding of life and our basic biology, there will be a number of disagreements on what the limits of gene manipulation should be. These debates will limit or change possible applications of this technology in unknown ways for decades.

An unintended consequence: People will develop ad hoc privacy zones where they can stay for short periods of time to get away from it all. These zones will be completely off limits to any kind of monitoring and available for breaks or extended vacation.

In 2025, green technologies will redefine civic and national infrastructures. In the face of accelerating climate change, green technologies will become less cost prohibitive, especially as governments and private enterprises will need to find new sources for energy as traditional sources become untenable. As a result, localized and nick-of-time energy production will become part of the fabric of social life. However, traditional infrastructures will slow implementation of these new technologies and will put cities, countries, and businesses at risk of disruption at the most basic level. An unintended consequence: The application of green technologies will be piecemeal and largely driven by local municipalities rather than nation states. The green infrastructure revolution will be a grassroots effort, but it will be far reaching enough to change the dynamic of global politics.

In 2025, 20 million driverless vehicles will make us all backseat drivers.

In 2025, the growth of global access to the internet will change business.

Autonomous mobility options, including taxis, shipping trucks, public transport, and personal cars, are finally taking to the road. Driving automation will unlock vast new potential for work and leisure and will completely transform the design of cities and transportation infrastructure. Large swaths of highway and tracts of existing developments will either be repurposed or fall into disrepair.

Expanding the global population’s access to the internet will expand business well beyond the boundaries of nation states. Global business will become even more essential, and companies will have to start working against many of the protectionist and populist political tendencies that are still evolving now. Borderless commerce will change the way companies exist within nation states and will increasingly force political shifts.

As AI-enabled technologies begin to become more common, workers will need extensive training to work with their AI and robot coworkers. This training will need to emphasize collaboration in order to stem the tide of blinkered attempts at making efficiencies in workforces by replacing human workers with technologies. Increased productivity and production will rely on a company’s ability to integrate its two workforces into a seamless team.

An unintended consequence: It will become increasingly common for people to have different citizenships, including one for where they physically reside, one for where they work digitally, and one for where they put their assets to work.

An unintended consequence: Robots will need to be taught to provide feedback for humans based on their ability to work with them, and that will determine the career progress for many workers. And humans will need to learn to keep the machines happy.

An unintended consequence: All transport vehicles will be turned into cafés, cinemas, training spaces, virtual conference rooms, hotels, and even hair salons, creating new employment opportunities. People can make productive use of their time sitting in traffic, and advertisers will jump on the opportunity to provide branded experiences.

In 2025, collaborative training will be essential.

In 2025, global weather patterns will be erratic and dangerous enough to force large populations to migrate away from uninhabitable places and into urban centers.

In 2025, many countries that were once considered “emerging” markets will begin to take their place at the forefront of the development of green and sustainable infrastructure.

These climate refugees will be forced to move, thereby further complicating local and global political tensions. The political and economic effects these shifts will have will be profound, and the pre-existing models of government will be stretched to a breaking point. New political organizations will begin to challenge centralized governments, as every population will be put under pressure.

Unburdened by protectionist attitudes towards legacy energy infrastructure, these countries will emerge as leaders because they will choose to invest in more technologically advanced infrastructure developments.

An unintended consequence: Two forms of global movements will emerge, one for the rich who can move by choice, and one for those fleeing increasingly inhospitable living conditions. The nature of border crossings will have to change permanently to accommodate both.

In 2025, the availability of unsecured credit will shift due to a global financial crisis and its detrimental impact on individual financial security across the globe. Governments will continue to be uninterested in doing very much about the financial situation, and individual security will erode to the point that people no longer own much beyond their consumables and their mobile phone. As a result, companies will increasingly offer subscription and rental models as alternatives to ownership. An unintended consequence: The social norms around what makes a middle-class life will shift, and consumer products will have to be produced outside the value system of a disposable culture. Ownership will focus on quality and design over cost, even though people will seek to own less.

An unintended consequence: Innovation will be driven by the application of technologies from the developed world in places where they were not intended to be used.

In 2025, we will still be a long way from any developments in general AI that could lead to the singularity. Ray Kurzweil will continue to age and enter a happy retirement that will go on, and on, and on. Or not. An unintended consequence: Futurism will change as the projected changes develop in ways that were not foreseen by most thought leaders. //// Dr. Paul Hartley is executive director and cofounder of the Institute for Human Futures and a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. Idris Mootee is global CEO of Idea Couture.

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Experience

Fine Italian Wine Zurich’s Münsterhof Restaurant Indian Accent New Delhi Gucci’s Ace Sneakers Raden Smart Luggage

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Experience

Comforting Cuisine: A Visit to Zurich’s Historic Restaurant Münsterhof BY MIRA BLUMENTHAL

For Fine Italian Wine, Look to Umbria B Y D R. T E D W I T E K

To discover fine wines off the beaten path, we need only to look to Italy – but not to Piedmont for its celebrated Barolo, nor to Tuscany and its craved Brunello di Montalcino. Rather, we can look to Umbria, a region in central Italy with an abundance of indigenous grapes grown from the region’s unique fertile terroir of sand and clay with limestone subsoil. Embracing innovation while respecting Italian traditions of vinification, the Lungarotti winemakers in Torgiano, Umbria produce both structured deep ruby reds and crisp, character-filled whites. Among the red gems they offer is the Rubesco Rosso di Torgiano DOC with its peppery spice aromas and hints of red fruit jam and violet. A blend of Sangiovese and Colorino varietals, this red offers

pleasant, balanced tannins in each ruby sip and a long fruity finish. The fact that these grapes are harvested between September and October holds a deeper meaning to the Lungarotti sisters. “The heritage of our wines comes from the region’s history and art,” notes Chiara Lungarotti. “The Fontana Maggiore, a brilliant sculptured fountain in the center of Perugia, is a central element of this heritage.” On the lower basin of the fountain, there are depictions of the agricultural work done during each season of the year. In September, of course, the sculptured diptych of harvest and vinification is displayed. “The diptych panel of September’s harvest and vinification was chosen for these labels because we always believed in the strong bond between its vinicultural production and the millenarian culture that is its foundation,” says Teresa Severini, one of Italy’s first female enologists. Not to be outdone by its brilliant red counterpart, the Bianco di Torgiano’s intense yet fresh collection of flavors includes elements of citrus that evolve to fresh fruit. This truly spectacular wine comprises a blend of Vermentino, Trebbiano, and Grechetto, with only free-run juice used. It has a structure not often found in a Sauvignon Blanc, which – together with its long finish – makes it a splendid alternative to a non-oaked white. ////

Not every restaurant – especially highly ranked ones – is able to emit such a sense of warmth and hospitality as Münsterhof in Zurich. The homey décor and ambient lighting, combined with the comforting food, make this well-regarded institution of Swiss cuisine both welcoming and charming. As someone who prefers holes in the wall to haute cuisine, I was pleased with how the intimate upstairs room lent itself to a relaxing dinner that was humble yet refined. The server offered great suggestions and was charismatic and chatty, but in a non-intrusive way. He suggested we try the Wiener Schnitzel, which was tasty and filling, and the hay soup, which was – as you can imagine – grassy and savory, as well as unexpectedly delightful. After the meal, which also included a hearty veal stew and bright crayfish and mango salad, the hostess sat with us to explain the history of the building, which is as rich as its food. As she poured us drams of Swiss liqueur, she explained that the restaurant, which sits in the middle of Zurich’s Old Town, resides in the second oldest house in the city, built around the 12th century. Inside its historic walls, the restaurant has been split into two levels. The ground floor is more “masculine,” featuring sleek and clean lines and minimalist décor. Upstairs, where we sat, is intended to be a more “feminine” space. It’s undoubtedly warmer, with upholstered seating and an eye-catching fresco on the wall. Known throughout the country, the medieval Liebesgarten mural – which depicts a joyous group indulging in both food and drink – inspired the culinary direction of the restaurant and its décor. The Münsterhof featured a small number of dishes, and each was executed superbly. Although the food was much more “meat and potatoes” than we initially expected, the leisurely dinner was a lovely way to spend an evening during our brief stay in Switzerland. //// mhof.ch

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Experience

Indian Accent New Delhi: A Twist on Tradition

BY MIRA BLUMENTHAL

When most North Americans think about Indian food, they think butter chicken, naan, and ornately decorated restaurants. So upon walking into Indian Accent in New Delhi, I was struck by the simple décor. In contrast to the hyper-curated hippie aesthetic of The Manor Hotel in which the restaurant resides, Indian Accent is quiet – musicless, in fact – and pristine. Visitors are intended to experience the food and its visual and olfactory qualities rather than be distracted by the room’s design. That’s not to say, however, that any details were overlooked. In fact, the place settings, silverware, and glassware were all sleek and thoughtfully designed. More importantly, there was a general ambience of warmth that was emitted by the staff. Although there were almost too many servers involved in our service, each was friendly, knowledgeable, and quick to act. But let’s get down to why I was really there: I wanted to see if the food was worth the hype. And most of it was. Of course, as with any high-ranking restaurant, Indian Accent is a place to see and be seen, but many of the dishes on their tasting menu were truly outstanding. The meal began with bite-sized naan filled with blue cheese, which smelled pungent yet tasted decadent. I opted to pair my bite with their Curry Collins, a bright and unique blend of gin, curry leaves, lime, and sugar. The amuse bouche was a carrot and fennel soup featuring muted Indian spices and served in a charming ceramic shotglass-sized mug. Then came a slew of rich small plates: a burrata papdi chaat that took the Northern Indian custom of starting a meal with a chaat and turned it on its head with Italian cheese; succulent pulled pork tacos served in shells made of traditional phulka; and meaty Kashmiri morel mushrooms. Some of the more unexpected items included a weird and wonderful donut made of tofu and paneer; a prawn wrapped in bacon; controversial (and sticky) mango short ribs (beef is sacred to many in India); and an unusually refreshing pomegranate and masala popsicle to cleanse the palate. Each dish took inspiration from the surrounding landscape, but was decidedly un-Indian – even the accompanying naan breads were filled with applewood-smoked bacon. We sat enthralled as the main course, scallop masala with kokum curry, was poured tableside. It looked refined and emitted a homey and spicy scent. But – surprisingly – it did not live up to the standard that had been set by the earlier courses. Despite this dish maintaining the theme of “Indian with a twist,” it was lackluster. Dessert, on the other hand, was extraordinary; it was a multi-sensory spectacle of flavor. The daulat ki chaat had saffron milk foam with rose petals and caramelized figs, and the cannoli evaded its Italian roots by being distinctly Indian. And, despite the extravagant presentation, all the desserts were well-balanced and light. By the end of the meal, the simplicity of the room seemed fitting as a minimalistic backdrop to the daring flavor combinations and cultural cross-pollination. Indian Accent undoubtedly proves that Indian food need not be reduced to curry and daal. I encourage any visitor to Delhi to experience their modern, international twists on traditional cooking. //// indianaccent.com

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Experience

Customize Away with Gucci’s Ace Sneakers

BY ESTHER ROGERS

Are you in the mood for something edgy? Or sparkly? Maybe you prefer sleek and sophisticated? Wouldn’t it be great if you could customize your sneakers depending on your mood for the day? Enter Gucci’s Ace Sneaker. These classic white kicks get an update for the fall with a collection of interchangeable patches that easily attach to the shoe’s tongue. From bows and bees to tigers and owls, there are over 100 patch combinations to choose from.

Gucci has been leading the pack with their iconic footwear over the past few years – especially with their classic loafers and fur-trimmed mules – and these patches are poised to be another favorite. Only one question remains: Are you in a panther mood, or a flower mood? //// The Ace Patch Sneakers range from $695-1100 and the Ace Patches range from $220-350. gucci.com

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Experience

City Slicker: Raden Smart Luggage

BY ESTHER ROGERS

How do you effectively put luggage like Raden to the test? You take it on a two-week trip to Japan, share the packing space with your husband, and haul it around to five different cities. Given the length of our trip, I opted for the A28 Check model in a husband-friendly, neutral shade of hunter green (apparently light pink is still too gendered in 2017, but I digress). I was worried about sharing the packing space and having room for the inevitable clothing and otaku haul I would do in Japan, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how well two people could pack in this suitcase and still have room for souvenirs. Raden’s polycarbonate shell is hardy, and the wheels run smooth. From the slick tiles of Tokyo’s railway stations to the cobblestone side streets of Kyoto, the luggage moved with little effort. It stood neatly in the corners of tiny hotel rooms, and made a sturdy seat for a Lawson’s grocery store lunch while waiting for a train to Hiroshima. The ability to charge our phones on the go was an absolute godsend, and saved us on a number of occasions where Google Translate and Maps were our

only beacons of hope for finding a tucked-away ryokan in Hakone. The other technology features, however, were unfortunately not as seamless. First, you have to download the Raden app and sync your luggage. While it may seem like a simple process, pairing for the first time was not the most intuitive. The app was certainly useful for measuring the weight of my luggage, but the GPS tracking was unreliable. It only gave me a vague idea of where the bag was once I handed it over at check-in (it said it was somewhere in the vicinity of the airport… no kidding), and it wouldn’t reconnect to the bag once we arrived at our destination, even as I watched it approach on the baggage carousel. Overall, the Raden A28 is a fine piece of luggage. It feels luxurious, makes organized packing easy, and rolls nicely along any surface. Next time, I would be inclined to get the smaller A22 Carry model instead, considering how much it can hold and the finicky nature of the GPS tracking. In light pink, naturally. //// A28 Check, $395 A22 Carry, $295 raden.com