is a unique conference dedicated to exploring the increasingly crucial nexus between business and design.

Brainstorm Design 2023

Ben Sheppard, Partner, McKinsey & Company Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills   Moderated by: Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Brainstorm Design

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design for Good

Conferences

Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills In conversation with: Clay Chandler, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design Leadership

We are so delighted to have Taman Evans here at this session. He's one of the most extraordinarily talented, not only just designers, people that I've ever met, he has had an amazing creative professional journey. He's been an entrepreneur, an architect and interior designer. He's led global branding and marketing teams. You heard a little bit today about what he's with this global network of designers. He's a lecturer at Harvard University and a real passionate educator just on many fronts, extraordinary accomplishment and we're going to talk to him a little bit about, about his job and how he works today. So Taman, please come out and join us. Are you stay right? That's where you are. Thank you very much. Thank you. Look at the beginning of our program today, I mentioned that, you know, one of the things that we observed at fortune was that uh that design is more than just branding and marketing. But I didn't mean to short change, branding and marketing because branding and marketing is a very important part of design. So I want to talk a little bit about that just now with you uh because that's your role at at uh the Mills, as you say. And um maybe we can start by just having a look at the video. Have we got to the the to man's video? We can sort of see the work that you're engaged in recently. Have a look at this. Do you wanna, do you wanna give us a kind of play by play of these products? This is from our, our fruit snacks portfolio. We call it Diff Fruit and it's hard enough to evolve. One of these brands. Uh There, there's tons of loyalty. We did three at the same time. Uh So you can imagine the stakes were high and we're talking about design leadership. So I think one of the first uh elements of that is uh setting the stage for your team. So I would be remiss not to give a shout out to Tamara Furman on my team. She's the design manager who oversaw this work, a herculean task to take not one but three brands and introduce brand worlds that cover new packaging, new logos, motion based logos, responsive logos quite an effort. So give us a little context of of General Mills. I mean, this is an extraordinary fortune 500 company. Very big long history. We were chatting a little bit last night about the number of products in in the sort of General Mills portfolio. Help us understand the scale of what you oversee. It is a dizzying number of products that's probably why I had to give that shout out to Ta Tomorrow because uh it's one hun 100 plus products globally. And people know us, I, I think most easily, easily for things like cereal. So uh Wheaties and Lucky Charms and Cheerios. But we're also Old Paso and Yoplait and Haagen Dazs and Betty Crocker brands with storied histories uh that are really loved in, in households around the world. And so there is an incredible sense of responsibility in being stewards of those brands. So you've got this vast portfolio and tell us how big is your design team. It's a, we are a small but mighty uh group uh depending on what we're touching, we probably get up to maybe in the twenties uh which if you think about 100 brands and that you uh design hands, it means we have to be very well organized. So you work with a lot of agencies and outside vendors, but the kind of crucial key decisions are yours and you're in this kind of key role of, of them being the the interface with management and executive uh leadership. So when you've got that many products and you've got that li a team, you have to really make careful decisions about, OK, which brands do we refresh uh when and so I'm interested in the decision to, to take these uh uh out for a refresh because these are, tell us a little bit about these three products because they're kind of interesting. They're relatively new. I mean, I am, I actually a little bit too old for them. I was already kind of, uh, out of high school by the time these brands rolled out. Pardon? The pun? But, uh, um, tell us about how they originated. Well, it's funny because I grew up on these brands. So I used as a kid, I used fruit roll ups as currency, uh, to get favors friends. Uh But we, these brands have incredible staying power. Uh They have a lot of uh sort of influence with young adults. And typically when we bring a story around about evolution around like this, because the brands in trouble or the entire category shifted. That wasn't the case here at all. These are very strong. And if anything, they're what we call capacity constraints, which means there's more demand than supply often. So that means that if we were going to talk about the need to set these brands up for growth, uh and for the future that we had to make sure that we were making a very compelling case to leadership. And that's my job, not just to say we're going to pull the design level for designs sake, but to tie it to a very concrete explicit growth story. So give us a sense of who the sort of target market for these would be. Well, it's great because when you start to pull them apart, which is some of the first work we had to do. We work with a great agency called Olson Saltzman to start to pull these brands in the portfolio of heart. But we'll start uh with honestly with uh fruit roll ups. Like I said, the one that I use this currency, uh that brand is being targeted towards young adults, but it's really meant to be to live as this permission slip to play. We like them to treat that brand as if it is literally a blank canvas and we want them to put their on it as we moved to fruit by the foot. We found still going after young adults that I used to always think about fruit by the foot is it's really, really long. And so we talk about more and more, we call it extraordinary. Uh And what we realized was that what was really important to the uh the young adults who are consuming fruit by the foot is that it was their moment to take a break. They called it their chill time. And so design now telegraphed that. So for that brand, it's really about giving, extending that moment of pause and chill time. So that's that story. And then third last but not least is gushers and that's all about what's letting uniquely you on the inside out. So you tell folks to be bold and, and, and, and very proud about who they are and the brand gives them permission to do that. So the gushers I, I like actually, and they're, but they, they come in a variety of different flavors and they, they really are, can be very sour and t to sort of wake you up. Um, so that's an, that's an interesting one how, um, I guess I have a couple of questions about this because these brands are now, you know, they originated long before social media was a thing And now they're uh they're being consumed by a generation for whom social media is second nature. And III I don't know if you want to talk about this or not, but I was quite amused by this thing that uh II I write about that, that uh roll ups have recently gone very viral because a couple of people on tiktok figured out this hack where you can take ice cream. I think it was Mango Ice cream and strawberry roll ups was the most popular one. And if you put the ice cream, well, maybe you can talk about like what? No, that's what I think you've done. The perfect job. They realized that there is this fantastic combination of fruit roll ups and ice cream where it becomes this chilled snack. And our R and D team was all over it as that virality started to happen. So what happens apparently is that uh the, the uh roll ups are kind of rubbery and um when you wrap them around the ice cream the cold temperature then instantly sort of freezes it and it gives us this crunchy uh crispiness. And so there's all this commentary on tiktok and it, it went viral and as soon as it started to go viral, I think I saw at least a half a dozen versions of people trying to knock this off and do their own version. I got some late night calls about it. My mom tried and I said, ok, we ticked the right boxes now as fast as the parent test. Well, that's also an interesting point because um many of these kids, their parents will remember this product in a, in an older context which we have to be sensitive to. Uh so we even if we were evolving these brands, we started by talking to consumers and they gave us permission to do certain things and permission not to do other things. But if we do the before and after for gushers used to be called fruit gushers, at least that's what we called it. Uh Fruit gushers, fruit by the foot, fruit roll up, we talk to our consumers are like we don't call their gushers, that's what we had on them. And so we, that gave us the permission to evolve that um on pack too. And so is there a kind of a in addition to the the sort of younger generation, there's still this kind of nostalgia factor to these brands? How do you reflect that in the, in the branding campaign. Well, if you were talking to uh my boss, our chief marketing officer, he would say he wants us to be stable on strategy fresh on execution. So there are certain tenets of these brands that we hold near and dear. We don't want them evolving all over the place, but then we know where there's room to play. Uh and it's different for each of these brands because we're positioning them for different things. And so that's what I keep in mind as I'm thinking about what will allow to go forward and what not. Uh in some cases, we're setting up some of these brands to compete in candy, totally different category, even though we're in fruit snacks. So they've got to be armed a little bit differently. But others, we just wanted to make sure we were bringing along those loyalists who have been with us for for years. But also making sure that if we're serious about a growth story that we've got to bring others under that tent as well and give them something that gives them that invitation to come into our world. And how do you judge whether this is working? I think what I love about being in a business like mine is that the business tells you, you can say the design is as great as you want it to be. But if you aren't moving that needle in terms of that top and bottom line then that is just art for your wall in your office. And that does not do much to make the, you know, the holders of the stock very happy. So that's a great segue for me to just talk a little bit about how you got to General Mills and, you know, we don't have a ton of time, but I would urge people to kind of look online to some of the other things that Tamon has led at, at General Mills. The, the Cheerios uh campaign is just fantastic, really brilliant uh marketing. Um So there, there are some good examples out there. Um really whimsical, fun, imaginative video campaigns uh that are terrific. But you started out not as a, as a commercial designer, you know, aspiring to work for a big company, you started out passionate about architecture, University of Florida, tell us what happened next. You know, I think it's strange whether or not it's kind of predictable that so many of the speakers on stage today were either architects or they started as architects. I think that's because architecture is really in education in three dimensional, sometimes four dimensional problem solving. And what's great about that is it means as an architect which I still consider myself to be, but I simply attacking problems at a different scale. I can walk around a problem in a way that allows me to appreciate that 300 m view up high. But then I've developed this telescopic ability to zoom into very minute details. Architecture teaches you that as a process and a way of working, I'm just a p using it to apply the problems that fit in the palm of your hand uh from day to day. Uh But I started out as an architect, I ended up working with Room Kha and he's the one that planted the seed while I was at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, the I could stretch and do more. He was working with Prada at the same time that he was building the Seattle Public Library and I thought that planted the seed in me to be an entrepreneur. So I went and I built my own company and I'm happy I did because it's one of the reasons that I'm so protective of our brands. I know how hard it is to build one. And I know that even though they seem very robust, they can actually be broken very easily and take years to repair. Uh And then from there, I uh ended up building that company at to a certain point of success in selling that company. And then I went and actually started um consulting uh did some time with the Rockwell Group. I had all of my faiths come together today. Uh my entire world collided today. So work with David Rockwell, you should also say Pepsi, you were Pepsico as well. That was a little later. But before that I was the VP um on the ad side VP of brand strategy at FCB Foot Cone and Building. And then Mauro poached me for, for Pepsi. And then from there, I moved on to General Mills. So that's an amazing experience. I mean, we should say that prior to going to Onao Ma and working with, with Ram Coolhaus. Uh I mean, you were a seriously uh trained designer, attended the Gun School of Design uh at Harvard. Um I wonder if maybe just in a minute and 30 seconds, you may say something about your graduate dissertation, your, your thesis, your dissertation, which was oh brilliant. Uh but also very provocative. Well, it was a joint thesis I did with my identical twin brother. Uh so that'll set the stage, but it actually was an interrogation of gated communities and we approached them from a branding perspective where we said let's actually engineer a better gate. It turned the problem on its ear. It was meant to provoke. Uh and it was called architectures of camouflage and subterfuge. So I'll leave that there. The rest is online. Yeah, it's really incredible. And so originally there was a debate about whether because this didn't really conform to the very strict and narrow rules for dissertations at, at Gunn. There were even people suggesting that this need to be thrown out, maybe you even needed to be expelled. Yep, it was, it caused quite a stir. Uh One of my uh huge mentors uh decided that he was going to uh to speak up for the work and say that this is provoking us in a way that isn't in the traditional sort of uh canon. And because of that ended up being nominated for the thesis prize. So just that you stick to it. Here you go. That's, that's fantastic. So tell us why you decided after graduating with such distinction. Uh you know, I mean, that was really a uh something that everybody at the school debated that that thesis, I think it was covered in the crimson of it was really AAA kind of a major thing. So after, you know, being on this trajectory to really be a kind of celebrated architect, having a stint with Ram and seeing what that looks like, you decide to go and kind of launch your own company with no prior experience running a business at all. What compelled you to make that switch in? In course, I think once I saw the power of my skill set to be unleashed into so many different spaces other than buildings, I had to try it for myself, but it could have failed spectacularly. And if it did, I would have maybe had to go back to O MA and knock on the door and beg them to let me back in. But it was an experiment that I had to undergo. And that was where I learned in the school of hard knocks, how to build a business, how to build a brand. And I take everything that I've learned from that and everything I do every day. So this was a company called uh Theo. They tell us quickly what, what it, what it meant. So, um we made, uh we ended up in a sustainable jewelry space. Uh and we discovered by Oprah Winfrey, she put us on her old list of favorite things which helps uh you know, in terms of, of growth. Uh But she tells the story of, oh, there were these two twins who uh started out as architects but discovered this world of sleek polished jewelry instead, it was made from mango wood. Uh So we were actually recycling that and they gave us a very particular niche and I understood the need to be unique and honestly super differentiated in a very proud do that to this day. They are beautiful pieces of jewelry, you know, absolutely fabulous. If you sort of again, look them up on the internet. So we've just got a little bit of time left. I want to mention that one of the things that you're very passionate about is educating young designers and that you are still teaching at Harvard and at other locations and tell us quickly about the course that you teach and and why it is that you are teaching that I teach a course called paper plastic. That is all about the uh supermarket landscape. And so I have, I have bring in designers, I bring in people from the business school, the Kennedy school MIT and I put them in teams and we tackle brand problems. We reposition brands and then build them from the ground up and introduce packaging innovations to them as well. And this is a course that's open to students from a variety of different disciplines, not just trained designers, people from the business school, you told me you were even accepting a couple of people from mit that are some engineering backgrounds. I mean, I think that's a fantastic model for exactly the kind of ideas. That's what we've been trying to talk about collaboration at the end of the day and getting people from other disciplines to kind of look at the world through that uh through that design lens. Uh Well, Taman, you know, I feel like we saved the best for last. I wish we had more time, but thank you so much for joining us and we wish you continued great success with your endeavors both at the mills and at the gun uh school and we hope you'll come back. It's a pleasure. Thanks everyone. Thank you, Jo. So we've reached the end of the day that concludes brainstorm design 2023. I want to thank all of today's speakers, our brainstorm design co chairs, and you our delegates here in the audience. You've been a terrific audience and we really appreciate that we want to extend. Extend a special thanks to our host partner, Mgm Kai and to Pansy Ho in particular, it has been a great joy to convene brainstorm design in this beautiful hotel. Uh We would also like to thank our strategic partner W Wang Yu Wu Lang Ye and our partner JIA Ling, our media partner Apco worldwide. Please now join us upstairs at the vista for cocktails, entertainment and dinner. So our hot new band, you'll love the name for them. We're calling them The Fortunes and it features, it features Tom Dixon brainstorm design co chair, Tony Chambers and our programming director carry Goldstein on drums. So would be a lot of fun. They've had about an hour and a half to practice and rehearse. So we'll see how that goes. And on your way out, please make sure that you grab a set of the D school's design library from the registration desk. Those are free. Those are there to be yours. And I think you'll learn a lot from them in addition to what we've covered here today. So with that, I'll conclude the day. Enjoy your evening. Have a lot of fun and thank you so much for coming.

Francis Belin, President, Christie’s Asia Pacific   In conversation with: Tony Chambers, Founder and Creative Director, Studio TC & Friends; Co-chair, Brainstorm Design

Brainstorm Design: When Androids Dream: Ai, Art And The New Marketplace

The advent of algorithm generated art has expanded our definition of art raising vital questions with massive implications for the industry is a piece of art any less valuable because it was created by an algorithm to help us tackle that question. And many more we're joined by Francis Belin, president of Christie's Asia Pacific who manages all Asia Pacific based teams and serves as a key decision maker for all transactions uh conducted by Asia based collectors on a global scale spanning live online and private sales. His global global purview extends to the supervision of Christie's Asian and world art departments as well as the luxury department. Please welcome Francis and Tony Chambers, founder of creative agency TC and friends, former editor in chief of wallpaper magazine and co chair of brainstorm design. Thank you Claire for that very nice introduction. And thank you Francis for joining us at brainstorm design in bringing, thank you for having me bringing your knowledge and your expertise in the art. Well, let's tell you about that. Not sure yet. We trust you um to our conference today, which as you know, the theme is empathy in the age of A I and we think that Christie's has been at the forefront of exploring this boundary between technology and art and the seminal moment in 2018 of the sale of the artwork Edmund de Bellamy. Can you tell us how the market has developed since then and how that sale impacted the perception of digital A I and generative art and how Christie's deals with it. Right? So we, we've been, you know, we've been around for quite some time. I was, you're not young me, not as long as, as the whole company, of course, but uh I studied in 1766 and uh the Emperor Chen Long was just halfway through his reign and the French revolution had not happened yet. So I think we've gone through a fair amount of revolution. So we've tried to adapt. OK. So based on this in um the history and the DNA of the, the, the company, I think there's also what's coming, what's coming up, how is the art market developing? How is the world of collectible developing? And what does that mean for the future? And we are always very curious and very engaged with different communities to understand uh what's coming up that moment where we saw the Mont De La Mi uh which actually sold for 432,000. Uh I think it was us. Uh It was not Hong Kong dollar, it was either us or pounds. Uh It was, this was generated by an algorithm. It was generated by, by a, a collective. Exactly. And it was, it was a pure A I based work. The data set with 15,000 portraits from the 14th century to the uh to the 21st century. And that basically got into the machine. And uh the fy beam who is the author of this work came up with that work and the response 4242 times the highest iate was quite phenomenal and surprised everyone. So we started with this, but we didn't stop there. We sold, uh we started to embrace in 2021 NFTS. Uh Some of you might remember, we sold the work by people for almost $70 million that met the, the headline around the world. It's the second time in seven years at three. So um uh season on headlines of major newspaper, the first time was the Leo Da Vinci in 2017. And we've continued to be very present at the forefront of digital art launching Christie's 3.0 which is an on chain platform to support the transaction of NFT. So we, you know, we try to do our bit to, to stay ahead of the game and, and be there for collectors. Uh also bringing to ourselves uh new objects and new, you know, new objects we think are worth looking at and collecting. And I was pleased to see that you recently published a collector's guide to A I and generative art. Now, I think I know a fair amount about this area, but I realized I didn't know as much as I thought. Perhaps, I guess in the audience may be the same way. Can you give us an insight and particularly the key difference between A I and generative art and actually digital art generally? So, uh without getting into too much detail, then I can reference everybody to actually.com. Um The first distinction is digital art and analog art. So analog art is what you know, since the early ages of art that existed, you have a pigment, you have a surface, you paint, you have iterations of this over time. Innovations of different kinds, including the tubes that B actually could finally use. Like he could travel outside of the studio and paint and capture the light. That's analog art. Digital art is using digital means to create. Now the way you create may or may not be generative. So there's an intersection between digital art and generative art, but generative art has existed for decades and basically has a principle which is I don't want to rely solely on my culture, on my brain, on my own emotions. I'm trying to extract myself as an artist from the system in which I grew and the system in which I live. So you had in the seventies or sixties or seventies, you had algorithm based computer supported art creation uh with aesthetics that will be very graphic. They were very geometrical and the extension of generative A I with uh so generative art with A I based art is basically using machines and algorithm like you have for artists like he and Adolph, for example, uh to create compositions uh that are generative and are digital. So there is digital and analog and there is generative which has existed before digital art actually existed. And A I is actually empowering generative art today, bringing it to the next dimension. I hope that was clear, very clear, but I want to just make it a little clearer. Um If you don't mind generative art, you say has been around a long time with machines, but A I is introduced this elements, the architect, the artificial intelligence elements, which adds a greater possibility of chance, less control, in fact, from the artist or the curator. Absolutely generative art. There is still a certain amount of control through the parameters that that artist puts in place. There is even if the objective of the artist when it gets into generative art is to let go as much as he can. And I think A I as such is a technology that helps to build in more even more chance uh into uh the ultimate work that has been created. You mentioned Rafiq an AOL who seems to be the poster boy at the moment of the A I um you sold a NFT of his for 1 million, 380,000. Back in 2022 there was some controversy recently for his hes at the Museum of Modern Art Can You? So we saw, we saw the, I think three works of uh Je and Ador. He's uh one of the most celebrated uh digital artists today. Uh As people was uh on the non A I base and it's less A I in what people does. He is very heavy on the A I side. Um I don't know if some of you have seen the work that was exhibited and actually acquired by Moma in New York. It's a massive wall, 7 8 m tall, 5 6 m wide. And it's a composition that evolves that is uh being programmed based on the data set. The data set is all the art P CS that Moma has acquired uh throughout its history. And uh there was a controversy recently between uh Rafi Anna and, and Jerry Sal was an art critic in New York. Jerry starts saying well that installation is nothing more than the screen server. Uh So I don't want to take sides, but I very expensive, very expensive screen server, but without taking sides because you know what my side would be anyway. Um What I think was really amazing when I saw the work first, I was personally touched. So I think the difference between a random random piece of furniture and the painting is it touches you. A random piece of furniture doesn't touch me. So if I, if you have art in your, in your home or if you come across art in a museum or in a place, it has to touch you. That's what fundamentally defines art. That piece of art touched me when I was there. I was absolutely mesmerized. But I was also as a, as someone who works in the art world, looking around how people interact or just don't interact with this. What is the dialogue that's being created between that art piece and the audience? And it was displayed in that lobby just before you go up the escalator to the galleries. And I observed that people stayed 1020 30 minutes sitting there looking at it. What's coming next? What is the next composition? What is the color? Where is that bubble actually going to land? And I think he managed to create with his massive installation A I based installation. Exactly the dialogue that I believe uh defines art. It creates emotion, it creates a connection. It's something that just, you know, brings you into what has been uh what has been made. I was in the, in the Rothko Show at the Envy Foundation recently in Paris. There's a lot of controversy at the beginning on Wolf Go, which is like this is just wallpaper. When you look at the Roco with the right lighting silence around you. It was hard. There was a lot of people visiting. That's exactly what it creates. There's something that she draws, it drives you, you know, it catches you inside the painting and you just, it touches you emotionally that you felt that same emotion. I felt it and I observed it and I was obviously not the only one when I looked at the way the rest of the audience at moma was uh was interacting with the objects. I think it's obviously a bit more than a screen set. Um That leads me on. It's created by a machine or data. Rafik is curating it in a sense. Well, in that sense, maybe not because the collection is there, but it's his concept. It's its idea. It's a conceptual piece in many, many cases. But um the thorny issue of intellectual property in that, you know, that piece, so many of the pieces are generated by an algorithm, but it's using human prompts from Rafik in this case and a database of images created by human artists. What's your take on that? But the short answer is if you buy a Christie for sure, it's all clear when it comes to intellectual properties. So no issue, I think A I is, is a, is a, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not certainly not an it specialist. But when you think of the Edmond Bellamy work that referenced a data set of 15,000 portraits, I think it's not that easy to actually prove that a certain pixel of that artwork actually directly links to the intellectual property on another work. So uh in that respect, I, I think there's more clarification which is needed if we do think that there is a legal implication in terms of intellectual property for the jury is still out as it were and the jury is still out. But II, I struggle logically, I struggle to understand how using a large data set, which is the whole point of A I, how you could be able as the owner of a certain piece of intellectual property, how you could claim uh your rights or the commercial dividends that the A I user has generated from that work. Now, my, my thinking is less legal, more ethical in the sense that how is it ethical to source work to create a new piece? I look at other history. Do we know any artist that has created a painting in a fully isolated way and has cut himself or herself out of any inspiration from any other artist? I cannot think of one. you know, whether you're Picasso, whether you're um matisse, you, they always reference to masters. Uh and they always, they make pies, they take bits and pieces here and there because that's what art is about. It's just building humanity one step at a time and you add your break building on what has been done before. So is a I fundamentally different. I don't think So I think it's just building on the same thing just in a different way. Very good answer. Um How is A I or how is Christie is using A I to better serve its clients and its customers through communication and pricing? So, so we get, yes. So we get into the uh the other side of A I for us, which is we are service industry. So we, we transact uh about 35,000 objects a year. We sold uh We haven't announced our results for this year, but we sold last year $8.4 billion has a lot of things that move. Uh And we have plans to sell and like any other service industry, whether us NB or airline or bank. Um A I is bringing a real revolution when it comes generative A I A revolution in terms of how we can serve clients. So there's a couple of things we're working on. One is when you're a collector, you're basically looking for unique objects. So how do you source based on your collecting uh you know, spirit and DNA, how do we help you as specialists in the art world in a more continue the conversation that you started with your collection in a way that is relevant to you. So that's the whole thing on how do we pick from the sales that are coming up objects that we think would be relevant for uh specific collection. Uh There's all the things um beyond search, which would apply to how we we serve clients. Um you know, just making sure that the emails are easier to write and you know, things that will transform, I think a lot of service industries, but I think we will also be embracing this in efficiency and an improvement in, in how these things work. And is that what part is Christie's 3.0 an element of that? So Christie's 3.0 is the on chain platform to transact NFTS. Uh Christie's 0.0 is, is one of the expression of uh Christie's uh commitment and DNA to innovate. Um We have launched uh two years ago, Christie's ventures, which is our own fund, actually finance companies that are in the section of art and technology. Uh so that we, we stay on top of what's going on. But we also support being, you know, one of the largest, you know, the largest in the industry, which to support these uh new players to, to take a stronger footing into the, the. So it's just the spirit that we have. So that's 13 point Christie's 3.0 is the NFT Christie's ventures. We have our Art and Tech summits. Uh We've had seven so far, one was in Hong Kong. Uh not so far, not so long ago. So it's more the philosophy that we have at Christie's despite our 250 plus years of history to try to stay at the forefront of you're staying light on your feet. Um Just to close, I would like to pivot from digits of an A I to bricks and mortar and I'd like to talk to you about Christie's new A P ach Q, the Henderson, which is growing as we speak. So another really exciting project for us, we have announced in 2021 that we'll be moving our regional headquarters to the Anderson in Hong Kong, the Zaha Hadid architect, design building. And what's really exciting for, for our teams in Asia and globally is to be able to build the first sale room post pandemic. Pandemic has changed a lot of things in the way we serve clients in the way we present objects and the way we facilitate transactions, we've had a massive amount of digital innovations into how we we self collectors and being able to reflect into the design of this new C room building on, you know, the world we're in today and not the world we were before pandemic, I think is uh hugely exciting. So we'll be moving in some second half of next year and be able to host a full program of uh sales, um auction, private sale exhibition shows and, and many other exciting things from January to December. Very much. Looking forward to it. Well, I hope we can invite you back next year to Macau and you can tell us how you have settled in Henderson, Francis. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Tim Fu, Designer, Studio Tim Fu He Wanyu, Founder, CEO, XKool Tech   Moderated by: Wang Fang, FORTUNE CHINA

Brainstorm Design 2023: How Ai Is Transforming Architecture

So Tim, we have heard a lot about your great work. Let us start, let you, I mean, let me start by asking you to give us a really quick run through some of the projects that you've been working on. Mm Right. Just to change things up, give a little five minute uh demo just to show through the some of the stuff that we do with artificial intelligence. Um My story started when I was still working as Al Hadid architects. Um It is here, I learned how to take complex geometries, how to work with them and eventually turn them into build objects and architecture. So with that background, um I started looking into the first program uh mid journey and the early days I explored a lot how to um figure out how to control the A I and design and potentially create things that are interesting and architecturally significant uh in terms of uh its pedagogical values. And uh I started sharing a lot of my work on social media and I think things kind of took off on its own. And I delve really deep into the exploration of A I and also using social media to share my contents and uh showcase its power and its prowess is a technology today. A I can do a lot. This has been one year of progress since I started. And with a lot of my work, I like to incorporate my infatuations with organic geometry and a lot of futuristic I would say and contemporary styles and finding ways to merge them where you can use lines and curves manipulated by the designer using the algorithm in order to get what you want to distill an information and idea that you had in your mind into something that looks potentially feasibly construct. With A I. We can explore the merits between tradition and modernity. I like to explore traditions ranging from the West, Middle Eastern as well as far East. So that's mostly through my journey. And then I discovered look X slash uh X cool in this domestic markets and we have our, the CEO on you here as well. So um interestingly what Keith showed earlier was actually a demo from uh her platform as well. So I think it's very interesting. We live in a time where um a lot of the technology converge and all of us architects find the same tools when we find it useful with. Look X. Though beyond just sketching, I like to investigates other methods of uh using A I for the design process. You can crumble a piece of paper, ask for it to prompt a Frank Gehry architecture and then do the same with potentially Zaha Hadid or in the style of Daniel Lek. I also try to find ways to incorporate sketch as well on my side because it's a little more human touch and I try to pump it into the architecture styles that I look forward to. When I'm designing through the traditional design style. Sometimes you could get inspirations from nature, organic forms and geometries and turn them into ideas of how we can potentially build the future of our cities. So today, I have left Al Hadid in order to pursue my own career in my own office because I took a big leap when I found out about A I and I believe we have to have a very radical way to recreate a new process in the architectural design practice to really heavily investigate the potential use of A I in all domains. This goes beyond just making pictures, how we connect algorithms designs with the power of A I to create rapid ideation, how we use A I to generate program distribution and using the visual A is in order to produce a qualitative results and feedback. It's about the immediacy of doing these things, manipulating design decisions and allowing the final results to take form in front of our eyes so that we can make these informed decisions more accurately. And I have various projects around the world that I'm in the process of engaging in. Although marked with NDA, I can showcase some of the concept designs that led on to further developments and this range from urban scale architecture to uh more potentially public cities and plazas. So to conclude, I would like to say that the future is uh really bright with A I. But really, we're just at the very start of it at the Nascent. So let's try to build a future together and see what A I and human can do together as co creators of our future. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. As Tim said, um the wonderful app that has enabled some of the great work that Tim showed us is called Look X. And it's exactly the same app that Keith used in his earlier session that turned his sketches into very vivid images of buildings this morning. So we have the creator of this app. M He, you right here with us. So when we have seen how sketches and image prompts are fed into the app, we've also seen the, the ending results out of the app. So can you show us what's happening in between, what are the thought process so to speak inside the app? Yeah. Um I also gonna show a few slides to um basically uh like um sharing my ideas. Firstly, our company called the X Cool. We have two kinds of products. One is called the LX, which is generating ideas, concepts, virtual ideas. That is for creativity and another part is for more engineering. So we can do the uh for instance, the compliance, the calculation, the every details for the design. So this is the basic two parts and the look a here can do three things, generation training. So meaning you can train your own models and do cos sharing so everybody can learn from each other. So talk about the base is the LX is based on the diffusion model. But with our own data and trained with uh computing power for quite a long while. And also like updating the algorithm. And then we have this, that's the result. Um And this is the base I can share how we do it. There's a three ways to do it. Firstly, we can do text to image, it's a similar to the journey, maybe everyone in our have tried. But here we can do some very simple labels. Like here you can select your labels more for the architectural design. Like the terminologist will usually use and the A I will elaborate the prompt for you. So you don't have to write the whole sentence and the A I can generate ideas for you. But those ideas are more like um searching for every possibility but then be more precise as architects to control the idea, we will have other um like ideas to do it. But the, the base is we have this algorithm model as the base people can control the files So we have a small like a low Laura model, low ranking adoption models. So people can select and merge their files. For instance, here is the hands skit model and the section model. And this algorithm models, you can combine them together and to create your own file out from it. So all those are based on the text to image. And the second part is we can do image to image and this image is more like referring to what we want to precisely control. For instance, here you can see uh we can upload our images like the hand sketch, a team show or the crumbling paper or from a picture from the nature or from the massing model whatsoever. And with those images, you just upload it and they give a reference image, this is like a one shot learning and then we got this result just in Yeah. Second, you can get it immediately and you can slide like in between and see is this precisely um like to your idea or not? Of course, you can also do other sketches or different ideas to try out everything. So uh our platform is enlarging uh like everyone can like uh show the idea even they can just uh scratching something. Um Yeah, from the the real world. And the last yeah thing is that we can do editing. So based on image, if you want to add some part for instance of this here, you want a part of the facade. You just um yeah, brushing out the area and ask the machine to regenerate this specific area. Then you can get a new sub out front for here. You can get a wooden facade instead of the previous glass facade or you can also do the massing to change it. So these are three ways to elaborate the generation. Thank you so much. It's wonderful. So Tim next question goes to you. So in your slides, we show you showed how you use crumpled paper as a picture prompt. I mean to feed into the app so that it creates images just like the crumpled paper. So and I think in a, in a recent article, you said something like um when you design with A I whimsicality and intention can both play a role. So can you use that crumpled paper as an example and tell us ela elaborate a little bit more on, I mean, the two elements working together? Yes, I think now in the design process with A I, um there's this idea of a dichotomy between what you can control and what you allow the A I to provide for you. So I think as a designer and an architect, you want to have a differently, a degree of control from your own design. S os in your perspective. But then uh where A I can come in is also and provide alternative options, provide uh how they, how they hallucinate the details in ways that you would not have preconceived. Um So I would say that the economy is about actually allowing a degree of that wins and Cali to take over. So that as a designer, although you are sure of your overall vision, you want to give A I an opportunity to express somewhat its own degree of creativity so that uh you become the overall curator of that process, but you almost allow A I to become like a co creator. Uh Another designer that's in your team to work together. Are you often surprised by what A I gives you? Yes. Yes. Uh Sometimes in a very bad way as well, it all depends, it's like rolling a dice. And so there's a saying that we should not rule out hallucination completely because sometimes great ideas come from hallucination. So what we've all seen what A I can do so tell me what A I cannot do at this stage for an architect. Yeah, I think the limitations of A I is uh trying to engage in every process going from design to construction, right? Because as many have already clearly stated that uh the design process is goes from the early concepts all the way to the development and the production and construction. And I think it's in those decision making that we really want the A I to show its power and we're still at the early phase where we're dabbling with the visual side of things which is in and itself incredible already. But I do believe the future of A I goes beyond that where we will be allowing then building information modeling as we call it to allow A I to take control of those informations, large data sets, uh understand occupancy and how uh use requirements can be optimally adjusted for the final result while simultaneously providing the the end result visual so that you as a designer can both understand the A I is providing the most optimal solution, but also gives you the best design that you can identify visually. In the end, I think Keith touched on that point as well. Sometimes you, you see really nice visuals of the building but perhaps in reality, it's non deliverable. So, so I want to turn to one Y so you have you put some thought into this question like what can and what cannot not A I do, right? So tell us a bit more. Yeah, actually, I have a one slide to show that um since we are looking to the process of the design and sorry, let, yeah, let me just click. Yeah, to this one. So there's the two parts of the design. Firstly is that we build up our ideas just like Tim just did. And secondly, is what we just talked about that we need to develop the design into a proper deliverable, which need to do the um for instance, the regulation, compliance, budget, checking all those things. And this is another set of product which is the orange line. We have the X design cloud which is a composing by three elements, the data model and the rules. And this rule is not the so called rule based. It's a combining with three parts. One is the compliance, which is the regulation code from all regions. And the six is the logic. For instance, every design institute they have their own logic. And third is the pattern. The pattern is something A I can learn especially deep learning from huge set of data. So this is the rule and this rule is something representing the human brain, that is something we learn from our experience. And when we compose those three things together, then the result is not just images, it can be a 3D model. So our base of all those orange uh Softwares, we call it A I driven building information model on cloud in short ABC. And this ABC contains these three parts and can deliver to the end which meaning we can deliver to the fact to do the prefabrication deliverables. And this is the project we had with the uh the the fabricators before. OK, great. So um since we are now, I mean, facing the future already, so where can architects get some um in a real efficient way, get some basic A I training? Are there any crash course that you guys recommend. Yeah, I mean, it's like a deep blue ocean right now and we all new fishes trying to fish around it. And I think uh one of the main programs that I teach uh called parametric architecture. This platform, we have uh A I course as well where I teach there. So that's one option. Um like a lot of these platform, we also have many various like new architects that also uh work with these tools with A I. So everybody has their own observations and their own sort of um way of engaging with this technology for design. So I think it's interesting to, to have a look at the different perspectives from the different uh potential tutors you can find from the internet, right? When I know your app has a function, right? Yes. Perhaps spread the knowledge a bit. Yeah. Uh Also back to the slides, please. Um There is the one we call the Creation Plaza. Yeah, just this one, I can play it, I think. Yeah. And this is a show in the Christian Plaza. Every designer or users on this platform can share what they have created with the A I and you can see what the problem is and what's the base images. So you can learn from it. And furthermore, we can um allow the users to allow others to do iteration based on their generation, which means they can iterate further based on all those results by their by meaning with their prompts, their base images or with their combination of all algorithm models. So when you, you said something um in the in the recent article, you said current A I is only narrow intelligence, it can only complete specific tasks under the guidance of humans. So explain it a little bit more. What, what narrow intelligence is and what's next for. Uh look at. Is it going to widen the knowledge in in general that the A I technology is developing from narrow A I to A G I artificial generate uh general in general. Yeah, that is the path for the base technology. And also for the architecture design is we are facing a similar thing because now uh our, you can see this one, our Softwares are doing specific staging uh like design or engineering or calculation. But we already saw there's a possibility that using launch language model like chatbots, we can link all those different apps together to create a new workflow I mean from today on and this new workflow can allow the people to like communicate much better with the A I. So the narrow A I is no longer narrow each other and the people need to manage each of the Softwares. But here using the large model to link them. But in the future A I will just use all those background uh algorithms within the A G I. So this is the way how it's developing. But today, we can already use the A chatbot to using those apps as the background to do the whole procedure. Right? So Tim, once we've load, uploaded all the repetitive work to A I, where can um architects better use their, I mean, the save time and energy on what kind of projects? Uh For example, for you, um, are there any new territories for you to uh sort of make a foray into once you have? I mean, the A I as a genius assistant? Yeah, I mean, you know the fact that you can just reduce your work flow by a lot your lot of your workload because uh especially if you're working with complex geometries, you're doing a lot of calculations already when I was working as a Hadid, for example, I was in the advanced computational design team and we often use various algorithms to speed up our process. And as you can imagine with the typical geometry from that office, every corner, every piece is very distinct and requires a lot of these calculation optimizations. So in a way we already have uh uh you know, we very much engaged with advanced computation in order to reduce that work flow even before A I. So I think as A I comes onto the scene, it is actually doing similar things in reducing our our workload in terms of that. Now, with what we can do with our free time, with our freed up, I mean, we are ultimately architects and designers, right. That's the value that we can share to society. It's not that we can draw the floor plan better than other people, but actually, we can solve problems in a creative way and develop a design that can also fill aesthetic principles and design os that humanity and society would like to see. So I think those are fundamental human values. And because that idea this, I think that we're not threatened by the idea of A I. But actually we're hoping that it comes to do the jobs that kind of is more repetitive as you say, so that we can focus on what is truly important as a human to have input in. So in, in in summary, you get to work on more fun projects, right? More exciting and fun projects and leave all the heavy work fun is a way to put it. Yeah, definitely you want to be doing stuff that you feel artistically engaged and that's why we're in this career in the first place, you know. So I have a question for both of you. So there's a debate on what A I can do. One school of thought is a, I can democratize the knowledge base and even skill set. So ordinary people can become designers. But the other school of thought is that A I will widen the gap between the gifted and the average. So what's your take on this? Oh OK. I never thought about it in that sense. But I think um yeah, of course, if a gap exists between the people that have the skill sets to engage in these technologies to make better society, then they should fulfill the role to do. So I think um in that sense, yes, architects should be the ones that are trying to build a better world. Of, of course, they have to have those assets. And uh we're talking about democratization on a broader spectrum. Yes, always the more, I guess you could say the people who are visually uh has visual acuities and more talented in that sense will be the ones that prefer engaging in design. And what we do with democratizing it is you, you allow A I to be accessible to people all over the world. Nowadays, you no longer need such a heavy computer. And uh a big, for example, in order to render a high quality image. Now, someone from any part of the developing world can also partake in this process, very much uh wide leaning possibilities of what we can achieve as a, you know, collective humanity. But of course, every country, every place, they're always gonna be the people that will have inclinations to do these things in an artistic way when you, so your app democratizes a lot of these images and the knowledges in in in this very specialized area. So do you think we all can be become architects and designers using your app. Yeah, if it's for your own house, I think it is. But for the general public, like general public building, we also need the architects to really um create the ideas and also to thinking about how to balance the relationship between the general public and the client and the users. This is something, yeah, I think as a personal designer or like ordinary people want to be a designer, they cannot consider this part, right? You still need uh grasp and the knowledge of the industry. Yeah. Right. Thank you so much. I think it's a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you.

In conversation with: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Brainstorm Design 2023: A Conversation With Tina Norden

Thank you, Nick. As always, good afternoon again, ladies and gentlemen, great pleasure to have Tina Norden with us here to show us some of her extraordinary work she does across the globe. Before we dig a little deeper into the work you and con and partners have been doing. I would like you to share a little bit to the audience about the impact, the influence and the legacy of your founder, Sir Terence Conran. So um lovely to be here. Great to not quite see you all because it's very bright up here. Um So, uh we've been around for about 40 fiveish years um founded by Sir Terence Conan, who most of you probably don't know, but he was very, very famous in the UK in his lifetime. And weirdly in Japan, I don't know how that happened. But anyway, um and you know, he came to Eminence post war when Britain was a very drab and gray place. Um And he really set out to bring some Gerard de V and I mean that literally because he loved France um and bring some European lifestyle or ST lifestyle of life as he like to call it he doesn't like the word lifestyle to the UK. So he started off as a designer, not an architect, not an interior designer, as a designer and textile, textile designer, in fact, um but was also a restaurateur and very much also a businessman. Um And I think that's, that's, you know, something that wasn't necessarily normal at the time, but he really wanted to bring um you know, the, the beautiful things in life to everybody. He actually founded Habitat. Um Tom was talking earlier about being the creative director at a later stage, but Terrence founded Habitat and it was really about bringing good design to everybody. Um He believed very strongly and we still do today that good design improves the quality of people's lives and no matter IA I or hand drawing or whatever, that is still absolutely a fact. And we, we very much believe into that in that. But also he believed in design, not having boundaries. You know, he was a fabric designer designed furniture, teamed up with a master planner in his first company and, and, and really didn't believe that there was, there was, there was any limit to the design disciplines that they should cross over, they should work together that one merges into the other. And I think that's still something that we very strongly believe in the, it's still within your, that, that message is still there and con and partners and yeah, as you touched on, he was very much a businessman. He's was his, his passion. He changed the, the whole language and the look of, of, of Britain. But in the eighties, it was growth, growth, growth with his restaurants, but also um acquiring companies, the Conran shops, he was the pioneer that showed that design as well as changing lifestyle actually was a big business. And I think we, we in the UK O owe a great debt to debt and he left great design as well and the company that you are now principal and partner. So I see that's your offices. He's still looming, looming has a very typical gesture telling us off. And he like to do that kind of thing. He was, he was a very tough boss, but in, in many ways, that's what challenges you. And I think what he also taught us um is that design is for the people that inhabit it. Um And that's not just the guests in the case of a hotel um or a restaurant, but it's also the people that work there. And I think, you know, designing for people and designing spaces that people can enjoy no matter what they might be doing in there, whether it's work or play is, is really important. And we need to think about that because people don't enjoy our spaces. A they won't enjoy it, but also they will change it, you know, so you so often go to restaurants year after opening they've got weird waiter stations everywhere, whatever this is because it didn't work. So, you know, I think that's a very important thing for us to consider. And hospitality is one of your specialities within, within the group. We'll talk a little bit later about how hospitality has changed. Now, the workplace has changed. But you again, what drew you to become a specialist within interior design and join common because your family were on the landscape. Yeah, my father was a landscape architect. Um And um I, so I was very much immersed in, in design and the design process from when I was very little, but I have no green thumbs whatsoever. I only own cacti at home. So I think it was better for me to go into the built environment. And I very much wanted to become an architect and I studied architecture um at Westminster, very kind of straightforward architecture and then started at con um for my year out and that really opened my eyes to the fact that there wasn't just architecture, architects kind of believe there's only architecture, right? So, but it opened my eyes to the fact that actually there was other elements to the apologies to the architects in the room. But I'm saying that was the greatest love and respect. But you know, it is there is some truth in that, but you know, it opened my eyes to the fact. So there was lots of other design disciplines and I actually ended up going to the RC A and studying architecture and interiors which back in the days of Nigel Coats was one course which sadly, it is no longer, I wish it was because I think it should be because when the two come together seamlessly, it's you get the best results. So shall we take a look at some of your stunning work? Um Talk us through. This is the, so this one is, is Taj the trees in Mumbai. Um And some of you may well be familiar with the Taj Bank, which is IHCL um hotels. Um typically um palace hotels, grand, beautiful, you know, very elaborate um designs. This is very, very different and that really was the result of a very strong collaboration and a very very clear brief from our client, the owner, um God Rich properties, very young um uh uh chairman now who really drives kind of an agenda for change. And I think this is a great example. There was a lot of discussion today about the importance of briefs, the importance of collaboration, the importance of working together as designers. And I think this is a really great example of an amazing result. It literally opened a couple of months ago um of, you know, not just um an amazing result but also something that maybe drives Taj as a brand into a slightly different direction, a different realm, challenged them as a as an operator, you know, and, and you know, was AAA fantastic example of, of people really working closely together to achieve an amazing thing. You know, workmanship can sometimes be a challenge in, in India. But the quality of work when she here was significantly better than in the UK. There's a, there's a revelation that's good to hear for India, not for the UK. Move on. Next one I think is a number of pieces for the Park Hyatt brand. Let me just see if I can get to work. Oh, yes, that's right. So yeah, we've been working with Park Hyatt for um for many years now and we, we are on the third Park Hyatt now. So it's the same brand, the same DNA um different owners, completely different locations. And I think what, you know what this is really showing is that with the same initial building blocks um to try and create something that is specific for the location specific for the, this is Auckland. So this is on the Harbor front in Oak in Auckland, New Zealand is a very democratic place. So it's designed with a kind of much more down to earth, kind of very approachable vibe. Um Then we've got Pakeha Jakarta, which we started virtually at the same time, opened a little bit later COVID et cetera, which is a lot more layered. Um a lot more ground, you know, has, has a bit more glamour to it, I guess because that again, is reflecting um what our client wanted, but also what that market is demanding. So it's trying to spin the story and trying to design something that is specific. Um And I think, you know, on our subject of A I et cetera, I think that the the the human factor of curation and of developing the brief and of kind of, I guess editing um and curating, I think that's still very, very important because that kind of briefing at the beginning of the project is absolutely key to, to getting, you know, the end result, right? And with a brand like this, which has this strong DNA but needs human touch in terms of interpreting the locale and that it's key and everyone is meant to be different. So that's, that's the whole kind of, you know, that's the whole story behind the and touching on A I um is a A I and other digital technology. Is it changing the way you think the way design is not in the hospitality industry? Because when I think of the hospitality industry, it's the one that really does rely heavily on empathetic design. Um It's an interesting, I mean, we, we heard this morning, you know, even the amazing stuff that we saw coming out of the, the sketches, he's been working on it for four months, I think he was saying. So it is really, really recent and I think, you know, like all other designers, we're probably grappling with how do we best use it? We started dabbling it and at the moment, kind of using it more to kind of update things, get rid of stuff in visuals that we don't really want and we don't really want to get a visual. And so we're probably in the kind of early stages of it. Um But very curious as to how we can harness it more particularly for me for the later processes. Um You know, I I can completely see the the the kind of the the the the benefit in creating these initial visuals, but I just feel that there needs to be a layer of that kind of curation and that kind of, you know, meaning in it, particularly in hospitality. Um So maybe that comes in at a slightly later stage when brief has been defined very clearly. Um But also, of course, then once you have defined the design, actually the processes of of getting that drawn up, you know, technically resolved and all of that kind of stuff, which takes a very, very long time, huge amounts of manpower, you know, and a lot of human error can happen. So if we can harness it for that, that would be like I would be very happy. Yes. And I think that's been a key thing that's been picked up today that if you can harness that power, get it to do all the things that maybe frees up the designer for thinking, the thinking time, the ideas and the true creativity. It is going to be the real, the tool that changes everything for the better. Um back to your projects. We're still in the park, High Peninsula Peninsula. So you're probably familiar with the Peninsula brand. Um You know, obviously a brand name, particularly in Hong Kong. Um So we were asked to um to create a new brand DNA for the Peninsula boutique, very small piece of the puzzle. Um So we opened Hong Kong um during, during COVID and London literally just opened with the new hotel. So it's a very grand dame of, you know, design really um very meticulous, very detailed focused and we were kind of tasked to create a new identity for the Peninsula boutique and cafe, which is very immersive, very kind of this is all Peninsula Green. But the exciting thing for us on this was it wasn't just designing one shop, but it was actually designing the whole brand DNA um including a very detailed um brand guide that designed all of the fittings, you know, for different sizes, high street concessions, et cetera. So as we were saying earlier, you could put that very happily in to an A I tool and now have that applied to different sites and different configurations because a lot of the DNA is already there. So then it's kind of about applying it in the easiest, cheapest and most kind of efficient way Yes. And then in a way the data one puts into an A I to then guide it, the prompts to guide it to a particular set of results is basically a brand book, isn't it exactly? It needs to be this, this, this, this um that's interesting. So this is brand building through interior design. So creating a look, a visual mood sense to the strength. Yeah, terrific. Um One other thing which obviously has affected your industry enormously, all of us um post pandemic, how the pandemic has transformed the function of the office and the hotel. And I believe you've been doing work where you've used your conflating those two functions more and more very much. So, I mean, this goes back to Terrence's life style of life. Um So he hated the phrase lifestyle, he hated the life. And so I don't think it's as strongly felt in Asia as it is in Europe, but we're really struggling with getting people back into offices and into studios. Um You know, it's become very normalized for people to work from home. People seem to enjoy it. I hate it, but, you know, people seem to enjoy it. So it's a real challenge to actually still offer space um to get people to come back, you know, even if it's just three or four days a week. Um So we've had a lot of clients coming to us basically wanting to create something different in their office spaces often it's maybe the lobbies, the shared areas to basically get tenants back in. Fundamentally, that's what it's about. So this is one Canada Square, very, very kind of um uh Grand Souza Pelli designed building 1970 Canary Wharf, Canary Wharf. That's right. Um And they asked us to, to effectively take on the lobby space, that incredible marvel thing, it was all there to create something that has a kind of human scale, has a kind of hospitality element to it, including new reception desks that wanted to be very kind of approachable um unique forward thinking, contemporary, all of those kind of things, but also importantly, bringing in hospitality. So we created these very open brasserie and cafe spaces that basically allow people to come in, have a coffee, you know, bring their laptop work there. And actually a lot of the people that work up in the offices are now coming down here to, you know, to have meetings to work, et cetera and actually using those spaces accordingly. So it's making the workplace more of a hospitable place to attend. Somebody said the phrase a couple of weeks ago to me about um as a manager or the owner of a business, getting your people into work, you have to earn their commute. So that was a great phrase, you know, why should I commute? Why should you as a as the, as the boss, the company needs to earn their use? And this is this is very much about that, you know, and, and these are not design companies, I think in design even stronger argument for people to work together. These are, you know, all sorts of different types of corporate offices. This is actually in Mayfair. So it was a similar kind of phrase, very different look and feel because obviously area very nice office and in fact, the client's um feedback this great port in the States um was that, that, that people are coming in to actually work downstairs, they don't go up into their offices, they actually work down here, which is great and obviously a great accolade for us. But again, with this, just to show that, you know, the previous on this one. And um and, and this space here also, which is actually just across the water in Hong Kong at the East Hotel um for swa hotels where we turned their all day dining space, merged it with Domain, which is a co-working concept to allow basically that space to function all the way from early in the morning until late at night, all the way through for meetings, catch up, eat dining, you know, we just did an interview there yesterday. So, you know, all sorts of different things and this is all of kind of merging the hospitality and the work real together and allowing people to work in the flexible way that they now like to work and making people kind of excited about, you know, keep your, keep your workers there 24 hours, why not? I mean, that would be the sinister way of doing that. But, you know, it's an added bonus. Just want to close on. Very excitingly and fascinating. Just recently at the end of last year, conn and Partners was bought by its five principles, including yourself. Very exciting time for you all but challenging. I'm sure how do you see the future direction of con? It's probably the most difficult time to, to buy any design business as many of you will know. But um you know, we have to be forward thinking. That's what design is all about, you know, um good design improves the quality of people's lives in short. You know, that's what we want to do. But, you know, we're very collaborative practice, we're very kind of top down, you know, you know, everybody working together, very democratic and, you know, really, it is about creating an environment where people can be creative um and where we can do the best work we can possibly do. That's a lovely business plan. Great for your work. I'm sure Terence is looking down at you with his characteristic acoustic finger and wishing you all the best as we do. Tina Norden. Thank you very much for sharing your vision. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, PepsiCo (appearing remotely) In conversation with: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2023: Yes, We Can: Reimagining An Iconic Brand

What an inspiring conversation that was with uh Andrew Lazaro and we're now going to have another equally inspiring conversation with another iconic figure in the design community. Mao Porcini joined Pepsico in 2012 as the company's first chief design officer. Uh since then, he has, as I said, become an icon in the world of design and really become the model of how you make design permeate a giant company like Pepsico. Over at 125 year history, Pepsico has maintained a deep connection to pop culture even as it attempted to foster what the company calls a bold challenger mindset. Today in the digital world, it presents even more unique design challenges for any brand, but for especially for one as pervasive as Pepsico. So how do you do it? How the design team honor a brand's rich heritage and simultaneously embrace a complicated blend of the physical, virtual social media, even the metaverse. Please welcome Maura Porcini who joins us from New York to walk through the challenges and responsibility of overseeing a beloved global brand. Mar Thank you, please. Hi, everybody. Hi, Alan. I wish I was there, but unfortunately, I'm here in New York. We wish you were here too tomorrow. But uh but you're very large on the screen. So it's almost like it's better than being here. We, we, we, we see you in, in, in, in full living color. Thank you. So, look, I already said you're an icon in the design community. But how did you get there? Where did Mara Porcini come from? How did you decide to get into design? And why? Well, I bumped into design almost randomly by coincidence. I, I wanted to be an author or an artist when I was a kid. And out of necessity, I come from a humble family. We didn't have the money. Uh My family didn't have the money to support me after university. I needed to find right away job as an artist or as a writer was not that easy back then in Italy. And so a friend of mine, somebody who was studying in high school with me told me about this new faculty that they just opened in Polytechnic of Milan, a cool design. So I was like, OK, let's try the test to enter uh this faculty. I did it iiii I entered the, the faculty and I discovered a word that I didn't even know it existed. It was fascinating. It is exactly what I always wanted to do. Uh And it's so similar actually to what I wanted to, what I wanted to be as an artist. Or as a, as an author, I realized it later. Uh being a designer, being a writer, being an artist, being a storyteller is all about understanding people, understanding what they need, what they want, what they desire and creating something that can touch their lives, that can touch their souls, that can touch their imagination, their brains. And so this is what I've been doing all these years through my designs. But also, you know, when I write books or when I, I'm on the stage right tonight with you or this morning in your time. So beautiful. Look, let's fast forward to 2012. You were then working at three ma company which I credit with the single best design product in history. The post it note uh a brilliant invention. Uh you, you were there, you get a call from the, from a recruiter saying that there's this chief design officer job at Pepsico and in your book which I read, it's wonderful. And I recommend it to everyone here in your book. You, you said that that called to mind a quote in Walter Isaacson's book about Steve Jobs where Steve Jobs is trying to get John Scully who was CEO of Pepsico to come work for apple. And, and he said to him to convince him, he said, John, do you want to spend your life selling sugar water or do you want to come change the world that quote is going through your mind as you're entering this conversation with Pepsico, what convinced you that there was more here than selling sugared water? Well, actually, because of that at the beginning, I turned down the offer II, I was, I was not interested on, on, on, on the company. I was coming from the world of innovation. I'm an industrial designer. I was thinking, well, what do I do in Pepsico packaging for Pepsi? Exciting, but not exactly what I wanted to do. And then the recruiter thanks to the recruiter convinced me to meet the CEO back then in the movie. And when I met Indra, I realized the opportunity that there was in the industry, not just in the company or philosophy of performance with purpose. And now she was trying to reshape an entire industry an entire way of interacting with the world of food and beverage. And so actually, uh in, in the meeting with her, I, I went with the book of Isaacson on, on the jobs and, and I, I ended up telling her, look, let's show the jobs and the world. And actually, we can change the world through a company like Pepsico. And this is not just about selling sugar, water, but it's really about impacting the way people interact with food and beverage with the overall uh industry and especially tackling some structural problems that the industry has sustainability, health awareness, think about personalization of the offerings, a world that is totally changing and evolving. And so this was an amazing opportunity that, that we had and we still have to do something meaningful for the world. It's a fascinating vision that she painted for you, but it was a job that didn't exist. Nobody was doing that at Pepsi then. So you would have to go into this giant established company and make all of that happen. And, and I'd like you to talk a little bit about your first experience because they were redesigning the soda fountain when you stepped into the company and not necessarily in a way you thought was correct. So how did you use that first experience to begin to establish the principles of design in the company? Look, I came in the company very confident about my tools, my approach to design, my approach to innovation but also very humble with a very humble approach, understanding that I didn't know at all the world of food and beverage and they were, I was going to be surrounded by people that were really experts in this. So here I am baptism of fire. There is this super important, high priority urgent project, redesign this sort of f why it was so high priority, urgent because our main competitor that you all know very well, co co co guys from Atlanta, they went to market um few years earlier with a very high tech machine that was using a new technology called micro dosing to customize your drinks. So what Pepsico was doing back then was to try to compete with the product in the market. So what often multinational corporations do a competitor or something you react, trying to beat them at the same game. So again, I didn't know much of the industry. I I went with the flow. I started to work on the brief that they gave me. But in parallel I started to ask questions, I asked the company, well, can you give me data information, insights about what the customers and the and the users want? There were not many data, the most of the data were about what competition was doing. So I started to very informally, I had no official budget for this. I started to informally talk to people, talk to customers, talk to users and they started to realize that actually, maybe there were other opportunities to tackle this, this, this this project. For instance, uh we, we realized very quickly that the customers, first of all were very price sensitive. They didn't want to spend so much money for those kinds of machines. We realized also that those machines, the one of competition were very big, imagine a big refrigerator and many of the customers didn't have the space for those kind of machines they can tops were to put something smaller. We realized also that the assumption that micro dosing was the must, that technology was the must was not that true. Many of these customers already had space behind these machines for the traditional technology of back in the box. They didn't, they didn't need that technology to reduce the space, you know, on the back of the machine. So long story short, without going into too much details, we realized that eventually the there was an opportunity to use a different technology, traditional technologies innovating on that technology reducing cost and using some of that cost saving some of the savings in adding additional features that were really relevant to the customer, the consumer. So we started to prototype al already solutions behind the scenes. But then at the certain point when we started to have something alternative that we felt very strong about, there was a problem I was new to the company. How do you go in front of all these people in R and D in marketing veterans of the company, veterans of the industry? And you propose something radically different. It was very tricky. So what happened is that again, there was a specific meeting that I talked about in the book. We are in front of the IND of hr of R and D, the C OS of the different businesses. We talked for one hour about the specific project, you know, the way we were working on the traditional approach that the team was having. And then at the very end, I take out the printout of these prototypes of these different directions that I uh that we started to work on and we start to share them with the with with the with the rest of the organization. And so the shiny object that prototype excited the room excited in that excited all these people around the table and gave us an opportunity to start investigating this other direction with the cross functional team. And then at the end, we were able to take it to the market. So many great lessons in that uh in that story, you know, don't focus on the technology solely on the technology. Don't focus on the competition, focus on the user, focus on the customer, what the customer needs and then the power of prototyping prototypes, the shiny object to, to begin to change the culture and get, get people excited. Uh uh Thank you for that. Let me, let me, let me now move to the present. You've got a, you've just redesigned, thank you for putting that up. You've just redesigned the Pepsi logo. Here it is, here's the new look. It, it's different, it's blacker. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but maybe you can describe what you're trying to do there. Well, actually, uh this project is very meaningful for us because back to 2012, when I came to the company, the second high priority project was uh essentially the need of unifying all the world around the new logo that was designed in 2008 2009. So back then the company commissioned the project to an external agency. They designed this new identity. We launched it in the United States in few other countries. But the world of Pepsico was divided, many of the bottlers, many of the regions around the world didn't want to take that new design. They didn't think it was the right one. They didn't have the right energy. And so here I am an in me, you need to unify the world around this design. So once again, I go to talk to people, I talk with our own people around the world, with customers, with users. And they realized that actually, that design didn't have the right energy that everybody was looking for. What you know, that bold and apologetic look and feel of Pepsi. But, but we just launched the new logo. We just launched the new visual identities. I couldn't change it right away. So what we did back then in 2012, 2013, we refreshed it a little bit. We changed the blue. We made it more saturated, more brilliant and we made the logo bigger. We made the font of Pepsi a little bit more fat, more bold. Uh So we did few tweaks to give it more energy and we those tweaks, we call that visual identity. Big Ball blue. We were able in 2013 to unify the world, but we knew that it was not enough. Over the years, we have been working on limited edition packaging on different kinds of experiences on a variety of different activations to give as much energy as possible to the brand. While we were doing that, we were testing ideas for the future. And so organically, we started to prototype different potential directions, hid them behind limited edition packaging, hidden behind different kinds of activations we could do for Super Bowl or for the we fa Champions League for music concerts and so on and so forth. We were testing prototyping and at a certain point, we realized a few things, for instance, uh people were when we were asking consumers, people out there to design the logo, many of them and you see the logos right now on the screen, many of them were designing the globe with the Pepsi warmer inside the globe. As you can see the logo, the logo that we had for these years at the Walmart outside of the globe, consumers were designing the globe with a Walmart inside like the the the logos that we had in the seventies in the eighties. And so at a certain point, instead of rejecting the insides, we decided to embrace it and we started to prototype different ideas with that kind of approach. And then the right time to redesign the logo, the visual I arrived, there are two reasons that push us to to do this change. One is this new focus on zero sugar. You know, the company is really committed to double down in communication in everything we do on zero sugar is the future of of the brand in our company. And then the second is the importance of the digital world. We needed to have a visual identity that is digital forward. And so here we are we designed this new logo, new brand and again, same lesson that I shared earlier power of prototype. But that yeah that that that first point you made is really important here, right? This is black because black has been used as the color of zero sugar, Pepsi. So this is a nudge, you're pushing consumers to the zero sugar project. It's black in many ways is black in the war mark is black in this outer line of the globe, but mostly is black in what we call the poles, the radiate from the globe. And so there is this blend of black and blue. So you know, in the past, it was Pepsi was blue. Now Pepsi is this blend of black and blue. They give us also the possibility of even master brand approach through all the different formulation. And it's all about pushing this idea of zero sugar is is all about that. Uh Mara you make the uh there it is on a there it is on a truck. I like that truck too. Uh You, you make the argument in the book that design in the modern world has become the only true moat. The only true competitive advantage. It's no longer about having the scale. It's no longer about having the capital or the uh uh the, the sunk cost plant and equipment. It's about having great design. Why are you so sure. That's correct. Well, look, we need to explain what design is. And you know, if you study the design at school, they teach you something very simple. They teach you to observe people and understand what they need, what they want, what they dream, what they desire. So designers are obsessed with creating something meaningful for people. Something that creates some form of value into their life, then they teach you by the way, you also need to make money with it. You know, you need also to understand how to create these solutions. So they teach you the three lances of design thinking. The first one once again is people its desirability. But then they teach you all the world of physic and viability, the business world and the technology world. But the starting point and the end point is creating value for people. If you study business, they teach you something different, they teach you to grow a business, grow, grow a business from A to B and then they tell you, well, you have different levers to grow. This business. One is called product, one is called communication, but you have also pricing, you have distribution, you have so many levers. So if you are a business leader that could, that goes to a company and you're stuck with a mediocre product, you don't touch your mediocre mediocre product, but you are, you are able to lever to use other levers to grow the business, no matter the mediocre product. You're a business star, you are, you know, an amazing professional in the business world. Designers that are obsessed with creating value, meaningful value for people who now why this is important because in this world we live in, in this global world, in this world that is digital and this ich in this world where all of this is essential, making the traditional barriers to entry of businesses, like the one of p barriers made of scale of production, communication and distribution crumbling down. And once again, the winds of globalization and new technologies in this kind of world, either you create something extraordinary for people or somebody else will do it on your behalf. Those barriers to entry we used to have are not as high as they used to be, as solid as they used to be. So while in the past, you could le you could use other levers to protect eventually the mediocrity of your offering today, your best competitive advantage is human Centricity. It's creating value for people and design is all about this. We are ambassadors of the human beings inside this corporation. It's beautifully put. It's a rallying cry for everybody in this room. And at this conference today, one last question before II, I let you go. You write in the book about the importance of mentorship. You've had great mentors throughout your career. What's the single best piece of advice that you ever got from one of your mentors that you can pass on to everyone here? Well, is the ability to protect your dreams, to protect uh to always think, big, always think. How can I do something that nobody ever did before me? No matter the uh the project you have in front of you, it could be, you know, a project is about disrupting the world, but it could be just a sim simple project, something very basic all the time thinking, how can I do something body ever did before? So this is the innovation mindset. Then you can use tools and processes and everything you want. But it all starts with that idea of creating something that is new, unique and different. This is for me so important. And then there is uh the importance of all the different traits and skills of these innovators, curiosity, optimism, uh kindness, ability to work with others and excitement, diversity of thinking. So there are many, many different traits that make the difference. You know, our processes are very important. But at the end of the day is all about the people behind those tools and those processes, what they call the unicorns, what they call the people in love with people, the people, 33 shapes of love, three forms of love. The love for the people. We serve this obsession to create something extraordinary for the people in front of us. The love for what we do. That passion that give the ability to go through uh and, and beat every kind of roadblock and barrier. We, we, we, we see in front of us and then finally, the love for the people surrounding us because innovation design is not a one woman or one man show but is a cross functional effort. And we need to take all orders with us. Mara, thank you for that inspiring message uh to this group, really appreciate you being with us. Let's please give Mara Pin a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Allen. Thanks everybody.

Cliff Kuang, Author, User Friendly; UX Designer Katrina Alcorn, Former General Manager, Design, IBM Ben Sheppard, Partner, McKinsey & Company Moderated by: Clay Chandler, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design’s Next Chapter

Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director, Stanford d.school

Brainstorm Design 2023: Four Foundations For An Unknowable Future

Good morning. I'm Claire Zollman, senior editor at Fortune Sarah Stein Greenberg is the executive director of the Stanford D School where she leads a community of designers, faculty and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. Sarah is also author of creative Acts for Curious People How to Think, create and lead in unconventional ways. The anchor title in Stanford Design Library by now, you likely will have noticed titles from the design library on display around the room. Please take them uh take one. They are there for you. Uh Each year, nearly 1000 D school students attend classes, workshops and programs to learn how the thinking and skills behind design can enrich their own work and unleash their creative potential. Please help me in welcoming Sarah Stein Greenberg. Good morning. It is really a pleasure to be here with all of you. I want to start with a spark and this spark comes from the past and it also comes from the future and to catalyze this spark. I need your help. I need you to flex your imagination just a little bit. So let me ask you to imagine that today is your very first day of college. You walk into the classroom, you sit down at a table and your professor hands you a memo that he says was written by someone who is currently 37 light years away on a very distant planet that is orbiting the star Arcturus, which in real life is the fourth brightest star in earth's night sky in the memo. You start to read about an alien species that has a totally different set of needs. And biology breathes a different set of gasses in their atmosphere, has a different relationship with gravity. The way it works on their planet is not the way it works on earth has their own culture, their own perspective, their own society. As you look more closely at this memo, you start to notice some other details. You notice that the company that sent this memo to you is the Massachusetts Intergalactic traders, which is curious to you because currently you are a student at MIT in Cambridge Massachusetts. You notice it's been sent from the office of the chief designer who is really interested in figuring out how do we stimulate intergalactic trade with this alien species through the design of new products and services that might appeal to them. And then you notice a very critical detail which is that this memo is dated almost 1000 years in the future. Now, if you were actually a student at MIT in the early 19 fifties, you might have had this actual experience, you would have been able to see pages and pages, almost 100 and 50 pages of this case study that was created by a remarkable innovative educator named John Arnold. John Arnold created what he called the Arcturus four case study as a way to really radically experiment with something that he was finding challenging. He had observed in his students, his engineering students, a remarkable technical capacity, but he also observed that they were missing something that he thought was equally important in the design of new products and services. And that was the ability to approach a problem in a creative way. So he designed arc tourists to try to figure out how do we set those conditions for creativity to emerge. So for one example, he had the students design a timepiece some way of telling time, a watch or a clock or something else that would be of value to these aliens. But the students realized in reading the case study, they didn't know anything about the system of numbering or the way that these aliens felt about time. And so they had to make some educated guesses, they had to make some creative leaps and actually use their imaginations. Imagination was actually a requirement to be successful in this assignment. And that's really how Arnold was trying to experiment with how to help his students break out of a very binary. Yes. No kind of limited way of thinking. Now people found out about this because it was very unusual and this idea of using science fiction as the backdrop to help students flex their creative abilities and design new things um really gained notice. So these are some actual headlines from widely read publications in the US like Life Magazine and Popular Science. Uh the course where students lose earthly shackles and scientific pedagogy, unblock creativity. And of course, my absolute favorite spacemen makes college men think, which gives you a little feel for who was in the classroom at MIT at that time and also who was not in the classroom. And this experiment really garnered an unusual degree of public interest uh for something that was happening in a classroom. So Arnold a few years later left MIT and he came to Stanford. And by the early 19 sixties, these kinds of ideas and practices and approaches these, these early seeds became later on what we now know as Human Center design and design thinking in the early sixties, those were just beginning to take root. And at Stanford, we look back on this history with particular interest because it helps us understand a couple of big ideas. So the first is Arnold's thinking about what design was most useful for. So, in a traditional analytical engineering education, particularly at that time, students might be trying to figure out the answers to relatively clear yes or no questions like will this bridge that we've designed hold the weight that it is required to do. So. That might be a big challenge. It might be complicated to figure that out and require a lot of technical skill, but it is a yes, no answer. Whereas design problems he posited were really ones in which there could be many workable solutions and which was the best solution wasn't entirely obvious. Right. Design adds the most value where human behavior or human culture is important or the conditions in the context are really emerging or they're changing very rapidly, which is very familiar in the world that we live in today. And Arnold developed this like very playful but also very purposeful approach because of this important skill and ability that he felt that his students were missing this creative ability and that was reflected in the time that he was working. And it makes us ask the question, what is it that our students are missing today? What's important for them to understand how to do that? We may not even yet know how to teach as educators. So now Arnold's version of design feels very familiar to most of us in this room, right? It was characterized by the technical ability to make things real often in a variety of mediums as well as that spark of imagination that actually produces new ideas. And as you heard, just in that last conversation, design is in a very important moment of evolution. Once again, design is in an important moment of evolution. And in this period, we are really reimagining what our curriculum needs to look like to meet the moment. So we are imagining some additional pillars of design to add to these two. The first is the reality that as new mediums have joined, the ones that would have been present in Arnold's Day. So steel and wood and lots of physical mediums and has migrated to also include lots of digital environments, service, design experience, design, and of course new technologies like A I and even synthetic biology, the standard of care that we have to have as designers has greatly increased. We need to be training our students and equipping them to take responsibility for the long term outcomes of their work to be thinking about the impact on the planet, all people and even the data that we produce. And I would love to stand here and tell you that I can predict exactly what our students will need in 10 or 20 or 30 years. But given the rate of technological change, we can't predict that. And so we have a very strong responsibility to actually equip them to be what we call adaptive learners, right? Actually able to learn in situ in on the job for the rest of their lives and their careers and for design to add lasting value to the multiple stakeholders in the complex environments and challenges that we take on today, we think all four of these pillars need to be present in design education. Now, we don't know exactly what that needs to look like, but we have some ideas and we're seeing some glimmers or even if you will sparks. So I want to share one such spark, which is um the work of two of our recent graduates, Kelly Redman and Gabriella Dweck and Kelly and Gabby met in the Design masters program at Stanford. And they really came together over a shared desire to have significant impact in the world using design. And this passion really led them to a deep investigation of the palm oil industry. Now, many of you may know palm oil production has a lot of particularly environmental as well as social costs. It is leading to a tremendous amount of deforestation and has a lot of consequences on the climate because of that deforestation as well. But simultaneously, there is enormous global demand for palm oil. It is in soap, it is in toothpaste, it is in many kinds of food products. It is really everywhere and that picture is not going to change quickly. So this is a classic design challenge, right? You can imagine many workable solutions. You could think maybe Kelly and Gabby are gonna design a campaign to help discourage people from using products that have palm oil. You could think maybe they will start a product design firm that specializes in cosmetics that don't use palm oil. But the more that they investigated this industry through a really systemic and holistic lens, what they realized is that to have significant impact at scale, they needed to go higher in the value chain. So they realize that if produced differently, if they actually change the way that palm oil is produced, it could be the most environmentally friendly vegetable oil because it actually has a very, very high yield per acre. So together, they have co-founded a company called Olio Sustainable Palm Oil Solutions. They are determined to make a climate impact. They are determined to make an environmental justice impact and the way that they are approaching, that is actually to create a process that yields a synthetic alternative to palm oil that is far more sustainable than the current version. They have filed a provisional patent for the technology that they have designed, which involves taking the massive amount of waste that is lying on the ground as a result of the current palm oil production model, which also has a bad climate impact because as it decomposes it, it releases more carbon into the air. They take that waste material that by-product that no one else is using and feed it into a digester that involves both microwave and fermentation technology. And then they wind up with this much more sustainable palm oil substitute. So they're piloting that in several areas right now and very exciting. Equally important is that while they're designing that core technology, they're also designing the economic model that would allow small holders to be stakeholders in this process, to actually decentralize this means of production and to benefit economically. And that is really critically important they think to their differentiation strategy and to actually ensuring that people are going to adopt this solution versus other solutions that are also trying to work in this space. And you can see Gabby and Kelly's work across this very wide range of types of design, right? As we've just heard, design has dramatically expanded its remit, right? We work on services, we work on systems. We even think about how do we design the implications, the long term consequences of our work. And given this expanded purview, it makes those two additional pillars even more important, right? How can you design in a system if you're not able to adapt quickly, how can you think critically about the implications and even mitigating the potential consequences of your work if that's necessary without that higher standard of care baked into your design philosophy, all four are really essential now we live in a time where change is so rapid that we are all learning and adapting perhaps more quickly than we ever thought we could. And what that means is that the things that we are teaching our students now and equipping young people with, it's actually not just the responsibility to figure that out of educators, it's truly all of our responsibility. We are in the midst of what the World Economic Forum has called a reskilling emergency. And one of the things that is quite interesting in the chart um that you see on the slide, which was produced by a team at Deloitte um a few years ago is that they draw a very important distinction between technical skills, which is that expertise, that is context dependent, that allows you to produce good work outcomes in that context versus enduring human capabilities. Things like curiosity and empathy that are not context specific and therefore will not become obsolete as technology changes. And what you'll notice on this chart is design is all over it, right? These are the core capacities that we endeavor to nurture in all of our students. And it also reminds us of John Arnold's work to try to create that next type of education that was much more focused on that human capacity for creativity, not just the technical skill to build things. So we started with a spark and I want to conclude by asking you for some help in crafting a vision. So we do live in this amazing moment where things that once you might have thought of as science fiction, maybe space travel, maybe personalized medicine, maybe quantum computing, maybe sustainable palm oil, those might have been science fiction, but it feels like they might be right around the corner right now. And I want you to think about a young person who's in your life now and think about one of their descendants, maybe it's their, their child's child, or maybe it's your grandchild's grandchild. And I want you to think about their first day of school and imagine their walking into the classroom. What are those capabilities that you think will be important for them to have nurtured and have pulled out of them and to cultivate in those classrooms? What are the challenges that you want to make sure that they are equipped to face in their time? That is a collective project that I think we are all in together and I think design has a pretty important role to play in that. Thank you.

Liselott Stenfeldt, Director of R&D, Gehl

Brainstorm Design 2023: How To Use Data To Create Better Cities For Everyone

G architects approach to city planning focuses on creating human centric urban environments and prioritizing the needs and well being of people designing cities that are not only functional but also enjoyable and sustainable. Gel's incremental approach to transform in Copenhagen from an auto centric city to one designed to accommodate the needs and habits of pedestrians and cyclists has inspired a global movement to redefine how we live. LSAT Sten Feld is the Director of Gels Cities Team in Copenhagen, as well as head of R and D lies a lot develops urban strategies using your mobility and data services to expose new patterns and unfold social connections. Please welcome lies at Stel. Hi, everyone. So nice to be here today and I'm really thrilled about how this morning started with the discussions. I was myself a student from the school of architecture but always looking for something else. So I actually went over to study data sciences and I also studied interaction design to actually try to encourage how you meet people and how you work with interaction. This later brought me back to architecture and now I am at Gale uh working with how to use data to create better cities for everyone. We are a global urban strategy and design firm and we're working with understanding how people and place shape one another because they do relate to each other. We are about 100 and 40 people. We're based in Copenhagen, New York and San Francisco. And I think we started off being an architect company and most people still know us as urban planners. But to be honest, it's only 40% that are urban planners in Gael today. And we more see ourselves as urban change makers, data or social scientists, strategists and designers. You can see this also as a sign on how complex cities are and how they're changing and how we need other competences. We have been working, we are working in very many cities in the world. We have data going back 45 years. That is observational data about how people move, how they stay in cities and how they interact with each other. We also understand that cities cannot drive the change by themselves is this and this is not only relating to budgets, which is a big part of it, but it's also relating to how you can have an impact. We do believe that it is shaped by public and private sectors. So our client list includes both. So when working, for example, with Google, we actually help creating like better opportunities for brand activation in public space and in place when we work with IKEA, we bring them closer to their end users and to the citizens and give them a voice in the cities. So coming back to this, the physical environment affects how people behave. People's behavior also affects the public space. What we want to do is to make it as easy as possible for people to choose the right thing when coming to maintain it. Empathy in the age of A I in urban context, we think it requires a thoughtful and intentional approach. There's so many ethical matters that we are actually confronted with in public space. There's a matter of trust, there's something about allowing transparency. There's a lot of aspects to think about in public space. This makes it a very good test bed. It also make it a tricky place. So for us, it's not important to be high tech. It's uh we are digital. I think we're hoping we're digital. Uh We do use digital technology. But for us, it's more important to understand what the intention is and to change something and have an impact. We are working with the glands. We developed a lot of digital tools in house. That's what our research and development team does. Uh where we actually connect data, we connect lived experience data with big data sets with online service with neighborhood life with spatial characteristic. And we want to call it thick data. It's not big data, not small data. It's something in between I will use some examples today to talk about how we actually bring data to action because I think this is also part of the importance. This first one is something about how to change culture. It's about how to actually translate data into stories that can have an impact Times square we worked with already in 2006. Uh we went out, we studied, we were supposed to create a better traffic flow. What we found out was that about 90% of the physical space were for cars, but at the same time, about 90% what we saw was people moving on this 10% of space. So this led us to the times square has no square. So when we worked with this, we could see how this data could actually help change policy. So this data actually helped uh the City of New York uh Department of Transportation to make a case to say, how can we actually change this into a square? So we were allowed in 2008 to free the space to do a weekend where we try to just put our chairs, just see what happens. This was measured. Obviously, we like to measure we are very database in that way. And that led us to doing this over a longer time. We were actually allowed to paint the pavement. We were allowed to put out better chairs and we were allowed to make people sit down and enjoy the cultural heritage, which is actually a and now 2019, many of these things have been implemented in the permanent uh way times square loop. And these are just some of the data that we then presented to the city where we can see decrease in pedestrian injuries, we can see decrease in traffic injuries, we can see improved travel time and so on. So this is how it's looking later. And one thing that I think is very important in this is the scalability. So we created a framework and over the last seven years, just there has been 70 plazas in New York where they have used this framework that we developed over this temporary time that has then changed on the utilized spaces. The next project is looking more on how we can work with cleaner air and cleaner air infrastructures. We're looking more on shorter term and we're looking at how we can create better places for, for a more well for Children in this case and for citizens that might not be considered as important in all all development cases. We connect the data between Google and us and we took our best experts. We wanted to know what eye level looked from a 95 centimeter perspective. From a three year old. We had a lot of three year olds in this project, we had asked their parents. So they were, it was ok. We followed them, they had cameras on their head and they reminded us what the eye level is and what kind of data we need to understand, to design for Children with Children. So what we did here was to connect all the data to connect data from Google, that was actually nanoparticles that was based on like street level data. So we could actually connect the data where this more air pollution was and where there were Children and where there were less air pollution. So this enabled us to then do a strategy for the city of Copenhagen where we worked with reduce and invite. So where can we reduce exposure for Children to be? And how can we invite people where there's less air pollution and make it more attractive? And this gave us a lot of uh guidelines. We created guidelines, we created design principles. I'm unfortunately not going to talk very much more about this project today. But this is also to give an example of what we use our data for. I continue with Shanghai Riverfront with is a project where we actually, I could talk about the strategy we developed in 2018, but I'm actually not going to do that today. I'm going to talk about the evaluation we did and the impact assessment we did because when we create a strategy like where we worked with creating a better connection in the city, we're working with active edges, we're working with diverse spaces. How do we know that it actually has an impact. This project was very unique because we did the strategy in 2018, 2021 after COVID, this is how it looked 42 kilometers public space. All of a sudden 15 minutes from about almost 5 million people. That's almost all Denmark. I just want to say uh what we did to evaluate was actually collect the data. Um We collect the data from social media to actually understand where is the high density of what people post and what do they post? We interviewed people on the ground to understand. Do you live here? Are you visitors? Uh Is this a time you like to spend time or a place to spend time? Uh We also looked at the spatial qualities, had it actually changed to have this connection to the city to have better access to metro and are people now not arriving as much with car? And these were some of the things we looked at to actually understand what what's behind this because the pictures in itself were nice. It is already like a really vibrant place to be. It's intriguing people are using it. But also did it live up to the strategy we created? Uh Here, you can also see taking away the car, make it walkable, actually creating vibrancy. The last project I want to talk about today is Stanford New School. And I think this is a very important project when coming to talking about data and talking about technology in this project, we wanted to understand how technology can actually make us understand the more subjective part and belonging. Um Stanford is creating their first new school in 70 years and they are focusing the school on sustainability and how you can work with sustainability in all different ways. They have been interested in involving people that maybe are not always part of the discussion about sustainability and also have them relate to this place and have them like share their feeling of belonging. So what we did was actually inviting people for photo walks. We wanted them to be very place space. We wanted them to share their experience about when they were walking around in the area. What feeling they have to the school and how they could actually relate this feeling, whether bad or or good to the physical space. We actually found that there were actually no tools for us to use. This is something we often find in ga uh we have some very clear ideas on what we want to understand, but we don't know how to get that data. So we actually developed our own tool, which is this eye level city app. And with the app, uh participants can simply take a photo, they can tell us if they like it or not and then they can annotate them and then they send it like postcards to us, then we get them in and here is a lot of dots that are all uh of course a photo and we had over 1000 photos coming in where they were annotated. And we all of a sudden could do a lot of um connection to other data we have gathered because yes, we had also interviewed people, we have talked to people. We very rarely use one data set. And then we could start to see the pattern. We could start to see that there is there is a clear line between positive tagged picture and whether there are people present, other people present in the place. And I will say that the old uh old thing J Gail always said was like where people are, people want to be. And I think this is kind of confirming us over and over again. It is important to design for social meetings. And we could also see that the top four words between all participants that were very different from each other was mental, well being architecture, physical comfort and atmosphere. Then we also have nature and community that are very strong indicators of where people said they felt they belong, they often belong in nature that was not very manicured, but very wild and natural. And coming back to this, people make places, this community feeling was something people were searching for. Uh and something they talked very much about when coming to having spaces to work into. Um some of this were was then translated into first guidelines, they were workshopped together with the people designing this the permanent part of this. Um And then we did something like this where we created, for example, the collaboration space you can see on left which is kind of the messy place where people can meet and it's more spontaneous and it's more like micro communities coming together and having these kind of flex places and making them adaptable has been a very big part of the outcome of how you then can define this. So this is just one of many examples on how it's important to also take the data and create actions for it. And I think this is kind of the take away from this talk I wanna give is I think it's important when coming to A I that A I and technology in general is still algorithms that reflect on our society. It's still something that is coming from society. And therefore we have to ask questions, we have to understand better how people behave, how we interact um to actually be able to do something sustainable, but also to make something that is really social, sustainable for everyone. So thank you.

Keith Griffiths, Chairman and Founder, Global Principal Designer, Aedas   In conversation with: Clay Chandler, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2023: The Power Of Sketching

We're going to kick off this next part of the program with something really special alive demonstration of the design process by one of the world's leading architects, Keith Griffiths is the chairman and founder and global principal designer of Aido, one of the world's largest architectural practices. It has a staff of 100 people and 12 offices worldwide. Keith leads a diverse portfolio of high rise residential, commercial retail and mixed use buildings across Asia Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. He's one of the creator minds behind the famous city skyline of Hong Kong. Uh despite the creative possibilities, A I Fords designers and they are always vast. Keith still believes that each project must begin with a hand drawn sketch. And so we're going to ask him a little bit about that and show us, ask him to show us his design process. Please welcome Keith Griffiths, chairman and founder, Global principal from Ida Keith. Yes. Yes, welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for making time to, to join us. Can we uh roll uh just a quick video clip behind us to give us a little bit of idea of uh some of the the projects that Keith's been involved with. Uh we got, we get that video going. There we go. If you turn the volume down a tad so that we can just kind of talk here, talk us through some of what we're we're seeing here. These are amazing images. First of all, what you're seeing here is how many people we've got about 1100 people, 12 studios throughout the world. And that balances our business out through periods of up and down. So we can maintain a steady size of business flow of business, which we've been for the last 20 years, maintaining that very steady size. We've been in the top 12 largest architectural companies for the last 20 odd years. This is the West Kowloon train terminus. You just saw there. If you're coming into Hong Kong or leaving Hong Kong, you've got to go through an Idas building, which I think is rather smart. But here's one of the airport buildings, the midfield concourse. Uh that's uh Doha airport, that's one we just opened and then all the sand stuff here. That's Venetian Paris, Londoner sands itself. They're all, they're all done. Uh with Ida's lead architects as the London. It's just, you know, like a whole world under itself there. It's pretty huge. That's just across the water that was Hench and IFC, a little box we did for Hong Kong land. And these are two towers and a dancer in Shenzhen. This is a New Ban uh Tower ST Regis uh Center for Sinovac and uh Sa Plaza. We do our headquarter buildings. These are up in Beijing. These are five headquarter buildings in Beijing and Quint, this is the world's most twisty tower. So it looks a bit dodgy actually. But that's 10 cents headquarters in Chongqing. That's China's headquarters. That's an enormous building and that's DAO Alibaba and uh that one is Shanghai Lovi Center. We just opened Lovi Center which is an experiential online offline mall. So that's looking to the future of malls. And on the right, we've got commercial bank which is exposing its innards, exposing all the meeting rooms. This is an amazing array of different shapes and forms here. Yeah, they really get to be crazy, isn't it? According to the clients? I mean, we we follow where the client wants to go. What are the needs of the building? Unilever Indonesia World Trade Center. That's Hong Kong land. This is the G 20 summit. I was so pleased to see all the world's dignitaries outside that building recently. And over in Athens, we started work on the Lenon already. That's moving very well. A lot of railway stations, that's the Dubai Light rail system and some further projects in the Middle East as well. And this is the one that I want folks to see this. Tell us about the, this is wonderful. This is Neon Trana Ski village top of a mountain in Saudi Arabia. And this is manufactured snow, of course, it's a hot climate there and this is enormous and very, very exciting. One of the projects that Saudis creating alongside the line and the cube and so on. Yeah, part of this whole big neon project in Saudi Arabia, not the sort of images we're accustomed to associating with Saudi Arabia, but uh just remarkable. So, you know, particularly for those of us who travel a lot in, in uh in China, in Asia, in, in the Middle East. I, I think we've all seen your building that you've, you've worked on in one kind of way or another, perhaps without realizing it. So fascinating to be able to chat with you a little bit about how your, how your process works, how and how it's how it's changing. Um We've spoken a couple of times about how you use uh uh A I but tell us when you started using A I and kind of how that, how that shifted the way that you work. OK. Well, we've only been using A I for a matter of months. It's, it's a phenomenon that's burst upon the architectural world in the last few months. And I'm a drawing architect I sketch. So we see as architects, we three, we see three dimensional buildings in our heads and we use sketching as instant two dimensional views as we move around the building or the building looks like this. What does that part look like I look down and I sketch it out. Now, that sketch is not normally enough for a client to make a decision. He needs something more. He needs, he needs a rendering, he needs color, he needs light and shade and that's where the torture part comes in. Because when you start working with a client with a developer, he wants to see all the options, he wants them all. And that process of going from a sketch that in your head to a rendering good enough for a client. We have to put it into computer. We have to create a computer model. We have to render the computer model and then show it to the client. Now, that process takes a week for each option. So even if you're running, it simultaneously could be 23 weeks before you can get to the client with a bunch of options. And then he says we don't like any of them. Torture, go away and do it again. Uh It's totally torture. Now. A I has made us the torturers. We're now of the sadist because we can create and you'll see in a minute, we can create an image every 30 seconds. No problem sketch. Yeah, that's a good one. I will. OK. Next one. No, don't like that one, next one. And then A I takes over and it creates reasonably accurate to the renders of what we've created as a sketch. Good enough to show a client in the first instance. So should we show this example here to give people a kind of visual idea of what this looks like? This is a sketch that took you how long to, to this sketch took about 20 minutes. So this is I'm showing this one because what we're gonna do later will be very quick 32nd sketches. But this is a more detailed sketch. So this, yeah, this is quite a detailed sketch. Remember you're talking two D to two da I is two D sketch is two D. It represents 3d. You can see a 3D space, but it is a representation of the two D and now you'll see what happens with it there in an atrium with some planted trees. OK? Here we go with the first shot, put it in and what do we get? We get some structural trees. That's interesting. We get some strange spider webs going on. That's interesting. So we pick the best one of those and we run it again with a few more prompts. So this gives you four different choices and you say, OK, you know, I like that one and then let's tinker with that one and fix it a little bit. So a few more than four choices and we keep moving it forward, keep moving forward. Now that good enough, right? We can get that in front of the client. That's OK. Yeah, I mean, the fact that you, that you've got a hand rail on top of a tree. It doesn't matter. It's good enough, you know. So you can give him the feel of what that space is gonna be like. And he might say, yeah, I don't want a shopping center for us, you know, forget it. This is great. Yeah. So um I want to step over to the table but just give us an idea quickly about uh manpower the old way of doing it versus this way of doing it to, to before you started using how many people would have you have to put on that kind of rendering process. OK. So traditionally, um you know, let's say uh you got two designers, say myself and another designer working through a problem, we've done the planning, whatever we're trying to get some visualizations, probably take us a couple of days to get some sketch vis visualizations that will go through simultaneously to the, the the computer guys who will be modeling it. They will take at least it's a model like this at least three or four days to get that model at least. And then it's got to go to renderers and they're gonna take four or five days at least. So just for that, you're looking at 10 days. All right, let's step over and see what the process can now look like. Uh Just step here and this is fun. I'm gonna try to, I hope, I hope we entertain you. Stay out of Keith. Keith left handed here. So just kind of perch on his left hand. This is Gianna Giana is the guy who does everything. So, so, so I, I just sketch, we're gonna bring a camera so you can kind of look over Keith's shoulder while sketch it. And if I draw the thing which is making it completely impossible for me, I'll get a slap wrist and I'm not wearing my glasses. So it's gonna be very. Ok. Ok. And um we're gonna start off with some high rise. Yeah. Ok. Smooth high rise. See my instruction. He's a client. Ok. So we'll start with some smooth high rise. Can we see this on the? There we go. All right. Great. Nice. OK. Good enough. OK. It's gonna start feeding that and we're gonna do another one. What's, what's the next one? Ok. We can do some. I just want to point out here how small this scanner is. It's OK. Crystal fee. So we have, we have all the power of A I platform that's harnessed on a laptop here with a scanner that's like it's like the size of a can of tennis balls. Good enough. OK. Can we see this next one? Yeah. Yeah. So there's two. Ok. The program is running right now. Ok. What are we gonna try now? Let's see, just like that. Wow. So we're gonna go a bit more crazy. Ok. So I want to mention that uh Keith is using a platform called uh X Cool, which is specifically designed for architects and urban planners. And we're going to have the founder of the company that created that platform uh on our program a little later today. So look forward to that. There you go. Get that. Huh. Not bad. Huh. So this is what the technology can do and you can compare it just OK. Wow, back and forth. So you see sketch versus rendering maybe. Uh OK. I a curry. Yeah. OK. So we wanna be horizontal, horizontal. So he's the boss. OK. We're gonna do a curvy swerve. Uh Let me see. Let me see. OK. There you go. Oh Nice. Uh Good enough. Uh Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Try that. And then we'll do a boxy afterwards. Yeah. OK. We can do a box because those would be exciting, aren't they? So we're gonna do a um post pandemic box. Yeah, we Oh Nice. That looks pretty complicated. Let's see. Let's just put a few more bits to make it more difficult for the machine. Wow. Coming to a skyline near you. Um So tell me um can this process work without really that much attention to the sketch? Could you give it visual or, or verbal prompts and generate what the kind of structure and image and feeling that you have in your head? Yeah, you could. But all things are working together here. So I've got some verbal prompts already. We've, we've given it, we've given it a uh imagery prompt as well. Um So we're guiding it down a certain path. Uh In fact, Jenna is just changing the prompt now for this box, because we're gonna use a prompt that's gonna make it much more realistic. And you'll see that it's quite interesting what happens there, curtain wall will start to appear. Um So those prompts work with the sketch. Do you need everything together? But essentially the reason for the sketch is it gets it out of my head the best way of transmitting the image. That's the fastest way. That's why it's powerful because yes, you can use the words, but words are a very long winded way of describing a three dimensional building. Oh It is a long tower with square sides and a bump in the middle. No, so you need this and this is exactly what's my head? I mean, there's no thought process going on. I'm completely dumb when I sketch, I'm thinking, I'll put a tower over here. Well, that's something that I'll do something here. I'll put a box, I put a box on top and I'm not actually thinking I'm just drawing, drawing, drawing and that's going straight into that machine. So that's the, the magic of A I is. And I can't do auto C ad, I can't do anything on a computer and I haven't been able to do it for the whole of my career 40 years. But now. Hey, I've got, I've got a computer working for me for the first time. But, but what's remarkable about this is that you don't need to be writing code. You don't need to be a programmer to be able to get the results, the vision and, and translate it into something that you can actually take to a client. Exactly. It's very straightforward, very easy. And it puts us in the driving seat for the first time as a technology. Wow. Amazing. Can we see some of these other renderings? Can we show the, the images that are on the, on the computer? There we go, we go. What can you show us on? There? It is. Look at that, look at that from that sketch and that's the one and there's the box one complete with clouds. It's amazing. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Oh, yeah, that's why I need. So, do you see any flaws in these drawings or they look pretty good? Oh, there's loads of flaws. But it's, it's good enough, you know, I mean, it's good enough to show the intent. OK. I'm going to do a curvy building. That's waves on waves. Yeah, that's good. So how do you know that these are structurally gonna hold up? You don't? OK. So then what has to happen? Well, now, you know, so we go through that process of what could the outside of the building be? Now, we could have come at it planned the building from the inside. And now we're thinking about the outside skin. So that's one way that we've got basically a form and a shape, we just modeling it. So the sketch would be done over. So I'd be basically taking, let's say, a form and shape like that and then taking over that and saying, OK, fine, I'm gonna change something. So I've got the total sketch and I'll just change something in that sketch. Right. So that's one way, the other way is that we don't know exactly the planning, but we've got roughly the mass of the building and we're really playing with what the urban designer, the client, the government would like to see on this site. Uh It's amazing. I, I wish we had more time for this. This is so fascinating, but Keith, you've given us a great uh sort of quick snapshot of just how revolutionary uh this technology can be and how, how creative really uh it can be uh when it's uh when it's in the right hands. Keith Griffiths. Thanks so much for joining us.

 Andrew Lazarow, Studio Leader, The Lab at Rockwell Group   In conversation with: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Brainstorm Design 2023: Designing Spectacles  

Cliff Kuang, Author, User Friendly; UX Designer


Brainstorm Design 2023: Problem Solving At Massive Scale Future 

Cliff Kwang is a user experience designer. He is an award winning journalist and he is author of the fantastic book, user friendly. How the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work and play. Please welcome Cliff Kwong. All right. Uh Thank you for having me. Um I'm going to talk a little bit about um some things I'm working on now. Um And some things I'm thinking about in the, in the wake of the book that I wrote that Clay mentioned. Um So I'll just start at the beginning um in the nearly 15 years since the iphone was announced, technology has become embedded um in almost every second of every day, not just in the phones and devices in our lives, but in the services and information, those devices deliver, whether you're booking a car ride across town or accessing the information you need to deliver, let's say patient care uh in an enterprise setting. So the point is that computers aren't just one device, they are quite literally the environment we live in and machines aren't just tools anymore. Uh They're partners in the way we go about our daily lives. Uh and today life is one ongoing human machine interaction. And so the question now we all have to answer is whether we realize it or not, how do you pair machines and people? What is the proper relationship between a machine and a person? Um And in today's talk, I want to give you a simple framework for what you might need to build, to create a healthy relationship, both to the world and to the machines around you. Um And I'll start in a moment about 40 years ago which most of you probably have heard of. Uh but perhaps don't know much about. Um And this is a picture of Three Mile Island which is a little spit of land in Pennsylvania, not far from New York City, probably about, I would say 90 minutes. Um And it was put simply the worst design disaster in American history, I would argue and if it began with something as banal as a clog in the basement, and now the maintenance crew at Three Mile Island actually, uh they were prepared for just an occurrence. Um You know, the uh a nuclear power plant is just this complex system of heating and cooling lines which always needed vigilance. They always needed to be taken care of and stewarded and just monitored constantly, right? But as the reactor went through a routine shutdown so that the problem could be isolated. A critical thing went wrong. The foreman in charge of the plant needed to flip a critical valve to the closed position to make sure that reactor system wasn't leaking water, um which was vital to keep the reactor cool enough to manage. But when the foreman flipped that switch, the switch lied to him, a light went on, presumably saying the valve has been closed just as you asked, but the light actually wasn't wired, right. So instead of being wired to light up when the valve was actually closed, it was wired to light up when the switch was flipped. So to put it another way, it marks intent rather than effect, right? And it didn't reflect whether that intent ie closed. This valve had actually happened in the real world where it actually mattered, right? So the feedback that that machine had offered had been taken for granted and badly designed to nearly catastrophic effect. And unbeknownst to anyone, the water cooling, that reactor core was escaping in a column of steam like a tea kettle with the, with the lid open. Um and three Mile island, I think is important because it signals just how much our relationship between man and machine depends on feedback, right? This idea that the machine is communi you are communicating with the machine, the machine is communicating with you and there is a kind of balletic sequence between those two things. Um And that's that sequence is just what we call feedback or feedback loops. Now, the most familiar delivery mechanism for feedback loops is the button, right? You want to do something, let's say you want to summon an Uber, you push a button, the button changes color you, then you get a message saying the cars on the way, then the car arrives. That's a feedback loop signal, input feedback reaction. Really that simple, right? But the point I want to make is that almost everything you appreciate about a product that's well designed and almost everything you hate about products that aren't comes down to feedback loops. How are they responding to me? How are they talking to me? How are they communicating my intent? Communicating the idea that they've understood my intent and what are they doing with that intent? And that notion of clear feedback that you can understand, it sits at the heart of every interaction you have on your phone. The feedback that give that a product gives you is the difference between understanding how something works and being mystified as to why it's so confusing and rethinking the way how we tell computers what to do. And the millions of little nuances of how it gives feedback in response to us is really what set us on the path of what I call the user friendly world, right? A world filled with technology from ease of use. We take so much for granted. The computers don't even come with instruction manuals anymore. I mean, just think about that if you are like me um you know, of an age where you remember VCR remotes and like VCR manuals, all these kinds of things. This is one of the greatest cultural accomplishments. I would argue the last 20 years, the fact that none of those things obtain anymore, right? You were expected to unwrap some of the most advanced technology, human beings have ever created and be able to use it without anybody telling you how now feedback even has the power to mold how you feel about a product, right? And a good example is Instagram stories. So when Instagram launched in 2010, it wasn't about putting up the perfect image of the perfect life, even though it became that pretty soon, it was actually about making your photos just good enough in the age of really bad camera phones that you didn't feel embarrassed sharing pictures of whoever, whatever you might be doing in the moment, right? But by 2016, 6 years after Instagram was founded, um they noticed that people were starting to be using it less and less. And it turns out that as cameras were getting better and as the ecosystem of amazing photographers on Instagram started growing, the bar was getting higher and higher and higher for what counted as good content on Instagram. And so in other words, people were becoming so self conscious about posting something good enough that they weren't posting as much content as they used to, which obviously is a mortal threat to Facebook. Right? And this is a massive problem for them. Um And so they copied, of course, the disappearing post of Snapchat. Um And the reason why is that because the very fact that they disappeared and the fact that the only way to respond was private message and the very fact that there was no public likes change the feedback a user might get from their post. And it made posting feel both less precious and also less loaded with meaning, right? In other words, it it lowered the barrier of what a post itself meant, right? And that simple shift, rethinking the types of feedback you could get from a post is what saved, Instagram. It completely halted the growth of Snapchat and revived the amount of engagement they were seeing and made the product ephemeral again instead of feeling like a 21st century art gallery. Now, designing feedback is about taking into account those four basic components that I mentioned, right? So a trigger which is something like looking like a need state. You have like writing, getting a right home or finding a new song to listen to an input, which is the act of pushing a button or engaging with the product that you found um the feedback, which is how the product surface shows you that something's been done and the reaction which is how you respond in kind, right? So feedback loops have the power not just to change the way we feel about the product as I hope to show you with that Instagram example, but how much we're willing to use it and they also have the power to shape the world around us as well. Um And I want to give you a few examples of how that works. Um to give you some inspiration about exactly how big the effect of something as simple as a feedback loop can be. So just to start with a thought experiment, um whether or not we understand them or not feedback loops, they shape the way we live, right? And the lack of feedback loops shapes us as well because it shapes our imaginations about what we can affect. So let's do a little thought experiment. Um We as a species began emitting carbon into the atmosphere about 100 years ago. Um But nothing seemed to happen, right? Nothing, not the next day. Um Not 10 years after that, not even 50 years later when, um you know, these little towns that popped up along the railroads become filled, became filled with cars like the Ford model. A now imagine if for a second, everything had been the same. But if instead that carbon that we've been releasing in the air, turned the sky green, everything was the same. Let's suspend the laws of physics and just imagine everything was the same, but the sky was getting greener all the time. So do you think if that simple change had happened, even if nothing else is different, that we would have spent the last 50 years arguing about whether or not climate change was real or do you think that we would have felt compelled to act on it even if we didn't know what the effects were going to be yet? Now, climate change is a good example of climate of feedback that we humans just aren't wired to understand because the time scales are too long, the system is too complex. Um And that example applies more generally, right? Um I want to suggest then a new framing about what technology does in our lives when it works well. Um New technology full stop just improves the feedback we can get how fast we can get it and it allows us to act on new types of information. Um So you can consider something like buyer seller feedback, right? Ebay was unknown. In fact, it was actually struggling before they introduced this feature where buyer and seller could rate each other just creating a feedback loop that actually engendered trust and made trust manifest in the system. And now that simple idea transformed the online buying economy such that we're we can we're willing to stay in the homes of a stranger even now, right? And the smartphone, for example, is the most powerful instrument of feedback that's ever been created. Thanks to the fact that it twins information and action in 11 interface and the entire entirety of social media itself is based on new feedback loops for social affirmation, right? I see. And I work on a lot of new innovative products. Um I would say almost all of them ultimately rest on bringing new feedback to the market. And when feedback loops, we need simply don't exist, we act as if there's no consequences to our actions. But of course, we know there are now, here's an example. Um You know, you don't know this but your electric, your electricity comes from all kinds of different places on a given day. Um Sometimes it might be coming from a coal fired power plant, other times it might be coming from a windmill. It depends on the load on the grid and factors like whether or not it's sunny or cloudy. Um So in Switzerland, a company is building a new carbon aware internet protocol, right? And the idea is to measure where it's sunniest and route internet traffic through those areas. Thus creating an economic incentive to actually make that, make that entire network more green, right? Because it increases demand to those green energy power stations, it increases the incentives for things to be built along those paths. And the idea is that if you can build this feedback driven energy route, you can incentivize faster development of green energy without any kind of centralized planning. Um Next is an example of a friend of mine who was stationed in Mosul in Iraq for a year who was an A I engineer for the United States, United Nations. Um to which you might ask, what is the United Nations A I engineer for? Well, my friend's job was actually to figure out safe pas routes for refugees, fleeing ISIS um as it took over Mosul. Um And this is harder than it seems, right. This is a desert. Um There are literally infinite numbers of paths you can take out of a city like Mosul. Um And if you're the UN, you don't know exactly where to support people or where they're going to go. But they did have cell phone data and they use that to analyze the calls being made from Mosul to other areas. And this is where it gets interesting by observing the calls that various people made on their cell phones and monitoring where those cell phones eventually ended up as they left, my friend could start predicting where people were going to go based on their phone calls. And once they knew that prediction, they would leave supplies on that route. And what would happen when those supplies would be left on the route is that people would tell other people, hey, you can go here and so they would, they would create, they would leave more supplies on that route. And eventually what happened is like this is a self reinforcing feedback loop and eventually you could have safety in numbers. So that's how you create a safe escape route from zero when there's literally infinite possibilities with just a feedback loop, right? So I'm going to skip ahead because I'm running a little bit at a time. But I want to offer you an example of personal action, right? To give you a sense of what you as a single individual might accomplish, right? This woman here, her name is Madeline Nonda. She was a TV reporter based in Douala Cameroon. She often covered the the floods that had been, become more and more common in her area in the last several years. Um And those floods were ruinous. They were catas catastrophic to everyday life, right? They prevented people from being able to go to school, to go to work. Um But Nendo would report on those floods and, and she didn't know what caused them, right? But what she figured out was basically that in 2015, there was a dam that was built and vast swaths of the forest have been cleared to make way for that dam, basically Uprooting the the the the webbing that kept all that soil in place. And so when rains would come, they would wash the soil away and then you would get flooding, right? But a lot of that logging was illegal because the people that would hear about a new development would say like, hey, I can pretend that I have a permit too and I can go deforest this land without anybody ever raising any, any issues, right? But what she did was actually what she realizes is that if I, if I hook up an S MS system to satellite monitoring of forest cover, then I can allow people to sign up for subscriptions to tiny little areas of forest, right? As little as 20 m uh on on a side. And that would create this new feedback loop where people at scale, like people like forest rangers or indigenous people could actually monitor uh in a distributed way the rain forest that they lived on. So they could basically say, hey, there's something happening here, we should go check that out, right. And what would happen was they actually by doing so they actually decreased the chances that any given part of this area would get deforested by an astounding 30% within just a couple of years, right? This is just a feedback with just a text message and just the ability to just that people have to self direct and go to the site for something where help is needed. Right. So Maddie's work, so I want to highlight is about this relationship between machines that give human capabilities and insights that the other would, wouldn't have um together with the tools to act on that insight. Um And the point is that those tools though have to be designed, right. Right. We have to put the hand the tools in the hands of the people at the right time in the right place with the wherewithal to make the right decision. Um And of course, Maddie's work is a small example, but I do think that there's reason to hope um because we can't solve the problems that face us either in our lives, in our workplaces, in our societies without creating new feedback loops. And in fact, we already are, but we still need to do more and we need to see those problems we face for what they are, which is feedback loops that need to be designed so that we can all know whether the things we do every day are, in fact leading to the world that we actually hope to create. Um I'll just leave you with five seconds uh with just like a very brief worksheet that I actually take students through sometimes to actually show how this actually works in print practice. You're free to take a picture and sort of see how this works for you. I just gave a little quick example of how I just, you know, just a very quick example of showing how you actually can build feedback loops into this notion of problem identification. Um And so that's my talk. I hope uh I hope you're able to make use of it. Thank you for having me.

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

Brainstorm Design 2023: Welcome

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

Brainstorm Design 2023: A Deep Dive With Tom Dixon

Next up, we have Tom Dixon. Tom Dixon. The man has been at the forefront of furniture and interior design for the past three decades. Tom is self taught yet he led the creative team at the British furniture retailer Habitat for 10 years before creating his eponymous brand in 2002. The brand is now featured in showrooms from Reykjavik to Tehran. Tom Dixon. The company is a prominent British luxury design brand specializing in furniture, lighting accessories and more with an aesthetic that is intrinsically inspired by the brand's British Roots. Tom's products have earned a claim for their pioneering use of materials and techniques. Today, he's going to tell us about his marine dream, an underwater factory and the development of bio rock. Please welcome Tom Dixon, right. We have a treat in store here. Click number one. I'm trying to show our first slide. Nothing's coming up. Oh, click three times in the oops, here we go. We go a little um sp that this um this is our marine dream that we'll talk about shortly. But to start us off today, I'd like you to take us back a number of years to your beginning, as I said earlier, self taught, no formal training in design but to create creative roots. Can you share with us a nice story of where you started? You've ended up here? Well, you asked me to dig up some slides. So here we go. Um So I guess I grew up in London in a time where formal education was not particularly prized. And so here you see uh my, my secondary school Holland Park Prison as they, they renamed it. Um and 19 seventies London. So it was an experiment in education. You know, London at the time you may remember was very tribal, you know, new romantics, punks, skinheads. Goth. Um And um yeah, so we weren't really that interested in, in learning stuff, but this school which was not, which was a failing school, had an amazing series of workshops, it had metal work, woodwork and ceramics. So there you see me age 16 in the pottery department. And I think it's through ceramics that I learn. At least when I look back when I learn about design because it's a transformation of a very cold wet, ugly material into something desirable to the power of creativity and the power of design. So it's touching you early on in this uh helping you escape the Holland Park prison as you, as you named it. And next stage. Well, you know everybody, I mean, I wasn't interested in design. Basically, I was, I was a much more normal kid, much more interested in, in cars and, and guitars. And so here you see, you know, I leave school uh with one qualification in ceramics. And, um, of course, I'm in the band and the band takes off and we travel to New York, we make records. The band is called, I'm not talking about the name of the band. B thank you. And, um, and you know, we, we for a very short time where we're quite popular. Um I then have a motorcycle crash. I break my, beat it on top of the pops. He's being very modest. They were big. We're talking about the, the design part of my career. So I am, yeah. II, I break my arm in um in a motorcycle accident and I'm replaced by a much better session player who's, who's now the best player for Pink Floyd. So I would think this could easily have been my destiny. Um But, but I'm already um I've learned to weld to fix my cars and my broken motorbike. And so the welding becomes a kind of superpower which which really allows me to make things very quickly. And I get transfixed by this ability to make strong structures in a, in a very quick and um unplanned way. So in this recuperation period after the broken Yes. So I get chucked out of the band. But luckily, um we'd already got involved in the nightclub business and um so I use the, the Welding as actually a performance on stage. And, and that's where I get my first clientele, the people that are in the club, you know, a lot of people in the club superficially, but they're hairdressers or, or fashion designers and they all want some metal work. So I learned how to be a designer through, you know, really through making informative pieces making, that was my marketing campaign. And then, and then I go into, into making things for people and, and I learned just through, through a lot of practice. Yeah, so moving on. So we'll after you, you, you turn into the Tom Dixon, we know now a very successful designer maker retailer. Um But today we're going to talk about an extraordinary project that you've been on for a few years in its this development of bio rock and in its sense, an underwater factory. Yeah. So I find this, this visionary Ecologist architects that worked in the seventies called Wolf Hilbert who dreamt of building cities under water and floating them to the surface. So of course, that didn't work. But in the process, he kind of discovered a series of techniques that allowed him to make a kind of naturally a natural concrete, reinforced concrete. It's like. So, so what happens is you get a metal structure and you charge it with a very small voltage of electricity from a solar panel if you like and, and it starts attracting the minerals from the, from the sea water and, and forms a version of, of limestone. Well, calcium carbonate, which, you know, you'll be familiar if you've ever had a kettle and it has a white deposit that would be calcium carbonate. But the, the electricity attracts the, the um the minerals to the structure and builds this, this natural cement. So, um you know, there's the city never happened, but in the process, he finds out a lot of different potential benefits of this technique, one which includes regenerating coral reefs and and then as a consequence of that, finding out that the coral reefs themselves are very effective ways of stopping, for instance, beach erosion, which increasingly now is, is a big topic. So I then go to the Bahamas and try out this technique. I decided I'm going to have an underwater factory and make some, you know, grow some chairs rather than create this metal, a metal framework. And then you, you, you drop it in the, in the water, it has to be warm water. So Bahamas is good and here the chairs maybe two years later. Um and you can start seeing already not just the accretion of the minerals but also other sea life barnacles and sponges grow at an accelerate accelerated rate as well. Um Three years later, there's a quite big incrustation of, of the material. Here I am uh fishing the first chair out of the water and, and you know, in a cross section through the material, the almost 20 centimeters of naturally occurring cement on the bars which are probably eight millimeters in diameter. So in a pretty effective way of growing of growing cement, obviously not very fast. You know, another thing is, you know, in the process of calcium carbonate, the carbon is another clue. So capturing carbon as well and it's been used a bit by various organizations to regenerate corals. So these are broken bits of coral that have been smashed by divers or by yachts and you can just tie them to the structures and they will grow four or five times faster than they might in nature. It's a really good way of regenerating coral. And then, you know, the last, well, one of the many benefits apart from, you know, increased marine life, but also coral regeneration is, is this increasingly pressing problem, which is the erosion of beaches through um through extreme weather events, which is becoming more and more, you know, more and more topical right now. And of course, the man's natural um way of dealing with stuff is just chucking a lot more concrete at the problem, right. So, you know, it's expensive, it's, it's um it's destructive to marine uh ecosphere kind of thing. Um And it's not that effective because concrete just reflects the the the wave power just bounces back and then pushes off and the problem to the next. So putting this simplistic solid wall is actually, and it's expensive, it's very expensive. So, you know, the principle here is that, you know, if, if, if, if, if it was possible to make, to regenerate coral reefs, not only would the structure be, you know, considerably cheaper. You have reinforced metal inside that, but you don't need the concrete because you're growing the concrete, you need solar panels anyway to power more and more of the world and, and so that there may well be something here that one can, one can do to mitigate some of the, of the things that are going on. So almost like a regeneration and regenerative project for the underwater rather than my stupid idea of the underwater factory or, or, or Wolf Hilbert's concepts of building cities on the sea. But we need Wolf and we need your stupid idea, which is not so stupid as a, it's a catalyst in a sense and it's a concept and an idea, it's very analog which, you know, we think you are amazing. So, what am I doing here? Exactly. How did you get in here? How is, well, I know why, how is A I in, you know, still in its infancy? I believe the use of A I is actually helping you get closer to this production. So, I mean, I think, you know, the, the beauty of A I and you know, we have heard a lot about the potential horrors and some of the more kind of, you know, incredible things that you can do very quickly with it is that they can imagine or you can demonstrate what, what would happen um within a virtual environment. So, you know, I guess there's going to be some talk about Digital Twins a bit later with, with Jan from Squint Opera that we're talking to about this project. But, you know, just to skim over the Digital twin idea is really that, you know, gaming technology has allowed us to create these whole environments that are virtual, that you can manipulate in real time, right? So, um and you can feed various streams of data into these models. Um you know, even NVIDIA, the the big chip maker right now collaborating with people like Lockheed Martin and the States to create, you know, virtual models of the whole world, you know, which are already being used to predict weather patterns and, and all kinds of, of um it's become very, very much better than the current way of testing the weather. So these models exist and, and you know, in my project, the difficulty is really and try to convince anybody that you should dump a load of metal into their seafront and then charge it with some electricity. You know, that's the sort of thing that really puts people off. But if you can, if you can do a physical test. So the next test is either in the Maldives or in Northern Australia and then you can model a much bigger because you know, to make any difference, you have to do things on a huge scale. Right now, we really have to accelerate some of these things and the difficult is really convincing people. So what's great about the digital model is not only can you create something which is a compelling argument, you can project it into the future as well. So you can say, well, what happens to the coral in 345 years time? You know, if it's growing at this rate now, you can just project that into, into the future. So the tests have been done, the data exists, the model needs to be created and this new test where we're collecting, the data is going to start in the next couple of months. So its usage first and foremost is empirical evidence that they think could work. You need some. Well, I mean, there's quite a lot of tests that have happened, but they're all on a tiny scale. So how do you convince somebody that is going to do that job of protecting their beach and, and that they don't need to spend £20 million or dollars on the concrete when they could spend three on, on the solar panels and the metal work to regenerate sea life, to bring employment for local communities, you know, maybe a dive experience and tourism and, and to actually regenerate the city rather than just add more massive man made structures in them. And again, it's also then helping you, which you're going to show now in a communication and marketing. Well, I think, you know, it does, you know, the way we're using it at the moment is, is not in the digital twin model, which is manipulative but just, just in a way to try and, and dream if you like. So that I think one of the big parts of design is to, is to get people to, to really visualize what things could be like and that don't exist already. So it's been very useful in just producing a whole series of iterations of structures that are somewhere between natural and man made for instance. And, and for sure, sometimes we just use them as structures to react against, say, well, that won't work. You can't tether it to the sea floor for instance. Um But at least it gives a kind of impression of what could happen if you start turning up the, the number of fish that can breed there or the amount of coral or what a dive experience might look like. So you can generate these, these um visuals very quickly. Um And I think they're all created through mid journey. Yeah. And, and uh by, by a great um uh digital artist called Ryan Taylor, actually, they're not my prompts here. Um But, but then, you know, the, the, the, you know what I've always found in talking about A I is whatever I say is out of date. Anyway, so you know what's happening right now is that particularly in the architecture and car building, you're not just using that visual is then an engineering model that you can take the data from and do technical drawings and then further on down the line plan the factory to make it. Um and, and also, and then feed other data. So then you can have your model having all kinds of, you know, weather data or sunshine data to see what happens different times of day, what happens in a couple of years and the rest of it. So, you know, because the models are not fixed and they're able to absorb lots of data from or learn from from other data as well. You're in a position where it's just in total infancy that these kind of of images are only um available, have only been available to us as, as lay lay people designers for a year and a half. Now it's still so much in its infancy, isn't it infancy? And it's also it's, it's, it's um it's power is increasing by the fact of 100 every time a new version is released. So, you know, maybe that every year, I mean, so in two years, that would be 10,000. Is that my math? Right? 100 times 100 somebody helped me out 100 times 100 10,000. Anyway, it's a lot, a lot more than Moore's Law. Yes. So, and here we are. So this is your dream or one of your dreams? We hope it can come to fruition. I think A I is helping it in many ways. Yeah, maybe, maybe I do get to a point where, where, you know, these structures are strong and tough enough grown under water to float them, you know, to drag them to the surface and use them as structures above ground as well. And they're a combination, you have very little control over over the final form. You kind of start something off and then you see it evolve, you know, like growing a forest or something. So there's something really nice about the combination of man made and nature working on the manmade rather than the opposite way. This is the empathetic side. I think that's how we make my visit here actually justified. Well, thank you, Tom. That was fascinating. I think you all agree. We have to make Tom's dream come to reality before we pass on to the next talk. I have one announcement to make the powers of persuasion of fortune have persuaded Tom to pick up his base again this evening. So during our cocktail reception, Tom and a couple of other members of the fortune team for me included are joining a few local musicians to do a groundbreaking session. It's going to be bio rock and roll, get it. So please come to the cocktail reception, hang around and bring your dancing shoes. Thank you very much for finding the time.

Pansy Ho, Chairperson and Executive Director, MGM China Holdings Limited In conversation with: Alan Murray, FORTUNE  

Brainstorm Design 2023: Macau’s Design Future

Macau has a bold economic vision for its future one that involves a dramatic expansion of the city's array of culture, art, retail entertainment uh offerings. As we heard this morning, successful urban design demands an understanding and engagement with local residents in order to shape cities and communities around the ways that people actually live. And there are few business leaders in the world. I would argue that understand their cities as well as Pansy Ho understands. Macau. Please welcome to the stage, Pansy Ho Fancy. First of all, thank you for hosting us in this fabulous hotel. It's been really great and uh we all appreciate it. Thank you very much for coming and especially a warm welcome to everyone. Hope this is if your first, then this will become the first of many. Uh I can guarantee you that because I'm sure you will all be converted now. Great. We will all come back. We, we promise and, and can you? It's I I've had some time to walk around. Things seem very busy. How close are you to your pre panem levels? Now, how much have you recovered at, at our property or you know our enterprise level, it would be probably already close to 80 some percent, eighties, eighties in the high eighties. But for the general um and average business wise in Macau, I would say official data would be close to 60 some percent. So you're outperforming in a kind of way. Um So, so your family, you and your family have been an integral part of Macau. Macau's development. Macau's history and its story for generations. What's next? Where does Macau go from here? I know that's something you've spent a lot of time thinking about working on. Give us a give us a notion of the vision for the future. Macau is going to have to take a new, completely new perspective. I mean, it, it's true after the return of the sovereignty to China, established as a special administrative region. Now we have, you know, been through 24 years now. Uh next year is our 25th anniversary. Um The 1st 20 plus years was mainly focused on basically building up all the infrastructure necessary in order so that Macau will a maintain a sustainable development in its pillar industry led tourism uh ecosystem. So it's very complicated and long, but it's actually very simple. It is using gaming to sustain and to help build out the non gaming aspects. Um in hospitality, in Mice in, you know, of course, now what we are looking at which is all the arts and cultural activities and you know, sports and recreation. It, it was 20 some years. Uh, it seemed very long, but I started back then thinking that we have so much to do. We did, we did a lot, look at, look around us. It's not just this property, it's all the different properties, especially in this area which we call the kai area 25 years ago. This was water, there was nothing, it was basically all reclaimed land and in fact, it was a um also historical or you know, a major move of having been able to fill these lands within, I think a short span of three years which you know, so don't, don't worry, we're not going to sink. Um This is very stable. Um But, but so we saw all this happen. Uh We didn't have a road map, to be honest, we just moved forward every time there would be the opportunity. The economy is responding positively, the policies from central government is going to support our growth or by giving us more visitors. I was there 25 years ago as the only supplier of the the main transportation link between Hong Kong and Macau. In those days, there weren't other possibilities of coming into Macau. You have to take a ferry. Yeah, you have to take the ferry. I provide that service. I can tell you what was the figure in those, you know, 25 years ago, the total visitation to Macau was three point a million a year uh before the pandemic. At 2019, we were close to 40 million, more than 10 times more than 10 times. Now, of course, they could come from different parts of China. They can come from different parts of the world and they can fly into five different uh international airport, Hong Kong International, Shenzhen Zhuhai, Guangzhou Macau's own. And they can all come to visit Macau but except what to do, what is there to do. I mean, even, you know, during the 20 some years, it's, it's mind boggling that there are, there were so many people who actually came, but now we need to make sure that they will continue coming. Yeah. So let's explore that. It's so interesting by the way, listening to you talk about this because I was uh last week in Abu Dhabi where we had a, a fortune conference and Abu Dhabi, you know, was uh the UAE had an economy that was 70 to 80% oil revenue. They now have it to about 50%. Their goal is to diversify and get the oil portion down to 30%. How about Macau? It's similar numbers, right? 70 to 80% is gaming a day. Where will you be? 10 years from now? We will have to be at least over 50. That is the goal. That is exactly what the goal has been set. That's a lot. That's a lot. So when we all came in, there were six integrated Resorts company now operating in Macau throughout the past 25 years, we have all basically contributed something like um $50 billion in terms of constructing out all these major facilities. Um The government last year was going through a what they call retender process, which is, we all have to, it was very serious. I have to come and live here for six months in order to prepare, you know, to that exercise. We all thought in the beginning it was just filling in a form, you know, just saying, yeah, sure. I want to stay on and you know, maybe I'm going to spend some money to make sure that we will upgrade the facilities. But no, they made it into a race. In fact, we were upgraded. We came first. We are very happy. Congratulations. But you were here for six months. I was in six months working for it without knowing, without knowing though, I came with a little hand carry bag thinking that I was here to just submit the already prepared, you know, file the docket and then I would be taking a nice picture and then I would say, yeah, I will wait for the results. Then they said no, no, because nobody had understood properly the exercise. They said no, we want you to fill in not just the form but explain and express exactly how you are going to fulfill. Yeah. So talk, yeah, talk, talk to us. About fulfillment because it's fascinating. I mean, going from 70 to 80% to 50% is no small thing I know. My understanding is that you in that process committed 2 billion $2 billion over the next 10 years to develop non gaming attractions. So, and you spent six months filling out the detail. What does the detail look like and how do you get people to come here for reasons other than gaming, the easiest way to explain this in the past. It's not like mccowen did not have, you know, interesting things to offer. We were talking, you know, before coming on stage already that Macau has had 500 years of very rich history of its own, you know, very deservingly. Uh If you had already time to go check it out, you can, Macau has been granted two UEO you know, kind of merits. One is for the cluster city of the world. The other one is for a creative city of gastronomy. But why did we have those? Because we had had already 500 years of using Macau as a gateway, you know, uh doing trading. And of course, there was a Portuguese uh presence and they had also brought a lot of the Western influences, but Maca has been a place that is interesting, not just because of that, but even hundreds of years ahead of that, there were already all the different settlers coming in from different parts of China So this is not in itself originally, there were the, you know, kind of uh um original types of people here. They were drawn from different parts of China with different traditions. So much more, you said this back, much more of a kind of a melting, much more, far more. Uh so, and then what happens now is even throughout the whole history when my dad started, you know, really bringing all the new infrastructure into Macau and reviving all these, you know, culture aspects. It serves a very small population base. It was mainly, you know, frequented by people from Hong Kong or some Asian people. Now, our ambition is far bigger. We want to attract the rest of the world. So what's gonna, what's gonna make me exactly. So in the past, we would have maybe over the year, we will have a Grand Prix. We have a, we have a Rose Street uh formula three Grand Prix, which has already celebrated its 65th anniversary. So we were ahead of many people. We were first. Um other than Monaco to really have a formula three road street racing longer history than even Monaco. Now, there's of course Singapore, there's Las Vegas, there's Abu Dhabi and so on. But we have done it far longer. But imagine in those days you have two weeks out of the whole year that you could have a major event, a mega event, so to speak. Then we added to it the music festival, there would be a Latin, you know, whatever parade, but it's scattered. It, it takes up, you know, maybe less than a month of time throughout, but spread out into the whole year. What the government has practically made us do is to write into the calendar. Now that practically on a monthly or even weekly basis, we're going to have something to offer, like what we're doing here now. So we, we would have tons of events and you know, they all have to be, some are acquired. Of course, you can just have a concert, we are going to have a concert. I'm not going to tell you, I have tickets to share with you because we already are fully sold off, you know, on our Bruno Mass on January 6th. That's great. But if you can get Taylor Swift to come, you will have your goal. But we have something also more interesting. It's not just always, you know, the the more popular commercial shows. We are also doing something we, since we are talking about, you know, brainstorming on design creativity, we're also doing something that original. That has been always the mark for MGN for me, you know, which is my, my, my, my passion and interest in doing something always with originality and, and I hope, which would also not only always become the first but more importantly, become something that would be, you know, for sustainable growth and development. So for instance, other than having a Bruno Mars event on the sixth of January, we also would be having two nights of very remark remarkable concert done by Tom Don who's coming in and he's going to do, you know, his most popular um or uh orchestra piece. And more importantly, this is with his own passion also to, you know, embrace and to promote minority uh ethnic minority art. Um And so he's going to because this whole idea originated from the Silk Road um from Dong Huang. So we are not going to very exciting, you know, as we speak. Now, I'm going to work with Tom Den, not just on the concert, but then to bring this, you know, into the next phase, which is we are trying to work on a Don won presentation together, going to the future. We're going to build out our own museum. We're going to have a fantasy here at the hotel at this property by next year, next year, when you come, I mean, the hotel itself is quite a museum. You have fabulous art, but those are only static, you know, those we collect and then we display now we're moving on to the next phase by next year, this time, hopefully, where will it be? Do you have the space? It's not on this property? It's going to be in the Peninsular property. We have dedicated 66,000 square feet, 66,600 square meters of space and turn it into what we call a fantasy book. And as all these things are developing, you have more concerts, you have Bruno Mars, you have an art gallery that people want to come visit. You want to attract people from all over the world to visit it. Do you think gaming will go down? No, we want gaming to go up. You want it all? Of course, we want gaming to go up, gaming will give us the money, the financial, you know, means in order so that we can plow that into, you know, all these, you have the workforce here to make all of this work. Yes. Well, the workforce is going to be something exactly on point that we need to be able to convince the government. And also, of course, the locals to want to embrace this, you know, that we are all working towards the same goal and they will want to invite more of foreign talent and people with expertise to come in and we work, you know, towards the goal of building not just one show, one event, but the whole ecosystem. Wow. So Macau is often compared to Las Vegas or maybe to Monaco. Do you, is there anything you can learn from those places are there or other cities you're looking to, to uh inspire what you're trying to build here? Um Ironically again, because my partners, you know, is from America is MGM itself from Las Vegas, the largest player in Las Vegas. But we, we are not looking to just copying or bringing just what has been done. In fact, anything that you see in Macau, especially with our properties, uh uh more originally created and, and an ation of, you know, what we believe would be the right um kind of directions and also offerings for the new customers that we see growing in China. If you've been yourself visiting some of these really, you know, amazing cities in China, you would, you would realize why we need to. In fact, this is a race who will actually become a leader in the pack. I was just in Hangzhou for the um Asian Games opening and we were all going to this new stadium, they built, not just a stadium, they built a new city for the Asian Games, a whole new city. And I am, you know, probably somebody who has been already quite well traveled and I've seen, you know, enough and when I was there, it was just mind boggling. Wow, you know why? And, and they have leapfrogged like by a decade or more uh in, in terms of and you know that now this is the hub of technology in Hangzhou where Alibaba, you know, is placing its headquarters and together they were not just one enterprise but practically becoming the Silicon Valley, you know, of Asia. All the talents were were there, all the young people were all you know, with beaming with great ideas gleaming with, you know, energy to to to push towards the next level in terms of technology and design and creativity. So I mean, Macau could easily take inspiration from them, from those cities. We definitely want to recruit talents from these places. We want to bring them and tell them we have. This is a clean slate. You come, we will work together, this is the perfect storm. This is the perfect formula. We have the means we have the financial resources, we have the needs, we have the customer base and it sounds like you have the determination and the determination and we have a deadline, we have to do it all within 10 years. One of the things that you pledged to do is redevelop the temple area. Can you talk about what you're doing? The temple? Of course, is one of the what we call the historic kind of heritage site under preservation, so called the ba you know, district because it's not just one temple, it's a temple situated in a wider uh kind of uh uh geographic area which has always in the past been the original area of uh uh the Portuguese settling. In fact that is where the Macau, the word or the name Macau came from. I only learned about that lately. Um Macau six month period, Macau in the past, nobody had been able to explain why Macau because it's not even a word in Portuguese and it's neither in Chinese. So that's where it all came from. The Portuguese people, they wanted to go to Canton, which is Guangzhou today and there was a storm and they got, you know, basically, you know, they, they lost their way and then they came into the Bay of Macau and they, they, they looked up and they see people running around, you know, they were very in those days having a major Portuguese trading ship, you know, coming into this port which is hardly noticed by anybody. And and the people they, they were saying, where is this place? What is the name of this place is this Canton? And that of course, these people would not be able to speak Portuguese. And they only pointed to the temple and said Macau Ma because the name in Chinese is the temple, the temple very, very important Ma which is the temple's name. And the Portuguese guy said, OK, so this is Macau, right? So they went back and then they actually produce maps, you know, now having putting us on the on the map. And so this there are so there's so much history. It's so rich in terms of storytelling that we can utilize. And this is the, this is what we also deem as the Sea Silk Road, one of the one of the Sea Silk Road ports which has been even recognized by the country. So we can develop also a lot. And which is why my project with Tom done because there is of course the Silk Road on the North and, but there's also the Silk Road, you know, along the sea coast and which is also all the things that we can utilize and then we can all work together. Um But we are not just here to talk about history, we want to talk about what's next. As you have asked me from the beginning, we want to bring even the artist. So what am I doing at a, a site? This is a huge area. There are all these um older shipyard um buildings that are now basically, you know, vacated. Um They're like any, you know, kind of older part of the kind of old cities that people want to go in and you, there's the preservation effort. But at the same time, you want to commercialize and you want to activate it. My proposal to the government is I want to create a artist village which is therefore something relevant to all of you. I want all the creative minds, all the people who want to basically utilize, you know, a place for you to explore, bring your ideas, but then, you know, overlay it with all sorts of different cultures and influences and you know, inspirations and we can work from here and then we will build a whole ecosystem. We want to have the studios here, we want to have the art fairs here. We want to, you know, bring festivals here. Fancy. You are speaking to a room full of people who can help you do that. These are what, what, what you were talking about is designing future and that's what everyone in this room is working on. That's what we've been talking about all day. I can't wait to come back in 10 years. You, you were 10 months, I don't have to wait 10 years. You were clearly a woman of passion and determination and I'm quite sure you're gonna get there. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us at. Thank you very much.

Shuhei Aoyama, Architect, Founding Partner, B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio In conversation with: Wang Fang, Executive Editor, Shanghai FORTUNE CHINA; Co-chair, Brainstorm

Brainstorm Design 2023: Small Spaces, Big Ideas

Over the past few years, our homes have become more than just a place for us to sleep. They have, they are our offices, our recreational spaces and our gyms. This revolution isn't limited to home design. It has also changed how we think about businesses, hospitality and retail to help us work through these changes. Uh Here today is Sh Oyama. Um the founding partner of Blue Architecture Studio. This session will be conducted in Mandarin for those who need a translation. You can listen by using uh you can listen in English by using the headsets on your tables. Please welcome to the stage, Shuei Aoyama and Fortune executive editor for Shanghai Wang Fang. Now 3.0 to see a woman to just take a, take a, take a, don't you? Now? Apartment. Yeah. So private area uh a now uh ha human condition put on the action. The uh you can take a good and you and now to see uh the other side, analog, the analog is the analog is back in vogue.

Charles Hayes, Executive Managing Director, Asia & Partner, IDEO Katrina Alcorn, Former General Manager, Design, IBM Prue Jones, Design Lead. Accenture Song   Moderated by: Clay Chandler, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2023: Leveraging Ai’s Power

Jan Bunge, Director, Squint/Opera In conversation with: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Brainstorm Design 2023: Enhancing User Experience With Digital Twins

The success of any city or building design gets decided the moment people are in these spaces and experiencing them. For that reason, Jan Bunge and the team at Squint Opera are focusing on creating digital experience twins to enable their clients to test and measure the experience virtually before committing to building. Please welcome Jan Bonga. Me too. How's the jet lag? I don't know. Oh, good, foolishly came from New York squeezed in too much, but it's great to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Um Before we, we get in and ask you to share some examples of the recent projects that you have utilized the latest digital twinning technology, I would like you to tell us about the origins of Squint Opera and the influence of the Maverick architect will all stop. Tell us about Will and Squint Opera. So first of all, thank you very much for having me. Um Will also, in my view is maybe the most fearless and and, and you know, beautiful architect and because he had a very, very simple idea, he believed that work had to be enjoyable and he included the client in this occasion. So he would only work with clients who are actually fun and enjoyable to work with. So that was one of his uh mantras, one of his mantras and, and he was very strict with that and it's something that you see in other successful architects. Uh But often you find out that they actually have money in the background. So it's easy to have this attitude if you have a, a safety net and will, didn't, will, will went bankrupt six times uh because he, he, he left projects that he was not happy with. So I have the greatest respect for that. So he would walk away from a project if it wasn't. Exactly. Exactly. And, and so one of Will's sons had studied architecture and together with four of his friends, I thought maybe this, this is what comes out of uh you know, if you are, is this true to yourself? You know, he, he didn't build much, but the stuff that he didn't manage to realize is really exceptional. Um And, you know, we started Squint Opera 22 years ago. It was four friends who had studied architecture but didn't want to become architects. They liked the idea of filmmaking but never made a film. Um And it was Will also who said it was one of his sons was one of the founding members of the Squint Opera. And Will said, you know, you guys can have a bunch of tables here and we can make films together. Um And that was at a time when architecture communication was just really boring, fly throughs. Uh and, and uh together with will, you know, we were able to explore different narratives and, and we, we grant actually introduced the idea of uh you know, human stories and, and narrative in architectural communications. This is the film we did early on uh to a project of his called chips. Um And uh it was really, you know, at a time where anything you know, you would see was just, you know, really badly rendered, very boring, fly through. Um And, and it was that kind of experimental spirit and fearlessness really that, that created a whole new approach to, you know, how we communicate architecture. And this is, this is the build, the build project not too dissimilar to our MGMK here in terms of the, everything comes from somewhere, right? This is our stacked jewel boxes was we have stacked chips or French fries to our American friends. I joined the Squint Opera 12 years ago when it was this lovely little studio, 20 creative people. And I think the unique thing about this company was and is the fact that, you know, if you start not knowing what you want to do, then somehow everything is an opportunity and everything is interesting. So anything that came to us, we would always take on and, and people would come with many different things and we started many different businesses in over the last 20 years. Um Just because we were driven by curiosity and, you know, just wanting to explore stuff. So, so today, um we are actually part of a larger conglomerate where 300 people operating globally. And um we are creating anything you would possibly need to communicate complex ideas in the cultural sector or in entertainment, but also still in, in the environment, which is what I'm talking about today. Uh Our, our studio is producing anything from, you know, films to to images, to graphic design. We have a bunch of digital designers, software developers, you know, doing the interactive stuff. And maybe 67 years ago, we started to pivot our internal pipeline from a kind of linear rendering pipeline to a to a real time pipeline. And today, maybe most of our projects in some way uh at the core are, you know, linked to the creation of of complete virtual real time world. Um We, we're not just a consultancy service, we actually make everything uh in house that we, that we talk about and it's a very hands on kind of business. Um But you know, all the typical stuff you know, from, from graphic design, a lot of 3d animation, a lot of two D animation. In the end, we have to connect to people. So we film a lot in camera and you know, as much as we can, we, we, we treat our film projects as kind of set extensions where we, we, we have real life in the foreground and then the the future reality kind of happens in the, in the back. And then we are not usual in the architectural communication. It was, it was, I mean, when we started doing this 1518 years ago, no client was asking for it and there was no budget for it and, and we would basically absorb this extra cost of having actors and screens and all that and making no money. Um because we thought it really is, that's what's missing, you know, in, in this piece. Um And today we have a, you know, half of our business is, is very much in the kind of interactive immersive space. So we built a lot of spatial experiences which have a digital interactive layer, a lot in the cultural sector, explaining anything from the complexity of border wine to how the first World War started. I think generally speaking, you know, this is also one of the reasons why people, you know, come in love work with us that is every project is very different and different in medium and, and different in the in the topic. From commercial showrooms to, you know, a lot of cultural work. Um But our journey into real time technology started when we were asked to join the team of think design to reimagine the visitor experience at Empire State Building. And, and this is a project which spans all the way from the entrance to the observation decks over five floors. I think we had like almost 80 digital touch points. Um And it was really for, for our designers uh very difficult to understand what would work in this space. And so we, we, we started building everything in real time. This was gonna be 2016, 1516. Um really as a tool for us to understand what would work in in this space, what kind of content, what kind of screen size? Um And very early on one of the first client reviews we had we did in our studio and when the client saw how we are actually designing it, uh He insisted that from now onwards, every review would have to happen in real time and we actually went and installed headsets to decline pay for this. He did it. But this guy by now we have grown as a business and but yeah, but it it was a very complex uh uh project that really spans across everything that Quin does. Um you know, from the concept design for the digital experience to, you know, all the kind of details, you know, to the character animation and the um stage design and filming. And so yeah, it it's very um these complex projects, I think it's extremely useful to simulate even at the design stage for as an from an internal perspective. Um you know, those complex settings because it really helps us to figure out how we should um uh curate the whole experience. And then subsequently, it's actually a really good tool to get the clients sign off because they really understand what it is that they are getting in the end. Did you commission music? We were, we have a, we have a sister company. So we do all our sounds and music design in house and in this case, we were able to commission the soundtrack for this experience. Sound is extremely important. Uh We haven't talked about as much yet but here. But I think visually, we, we all have a different way of perceiving imagery but sound and music just goes in a bit more into your, you know, subconsciousness's much less of an abstract. Yeah, that's incredible. 360. Yeah. And today it's just really every project starts with us. This is Peak Tramway uh in Hong Kong where we start with building a very simple 3D model. Uh Everything is happening in build times. We're building everything in unreal many cases like here, we also create all the content uh in, in real time. Um And then the client gets to uh so, I mean, just one little note, maybe this was not possible, you know, 23 years ago, the visual quality uh was, was not at that level. Um just recently that we were able to create these, you know, visually uh high quality renderings. And then we simulate the audio visual experience uh for our designers and, and for the client and, and this is the, the, the the final thing. So you get very close to the actual experience um that, that you will have in the, in the space. So one way of looking at this is that we're taking the, the engineering twins, the, the, the 3D models, the rabbit models of the designers, and we translate them into something that a non technical person can understand. And so it's all about simulating the experience. Um Another moment when, when this became clear to us was a project, we had the pleasure of working on with uh uh uh Akio Toyota. Um the, the, the, at this point, the CEO he was the CEO of Toyota. Now the chairman um and they had commissioned a research compass to explore kind of future areas of interest that Toyota might grow into as a business in the future known as the Woven City. Yes, exactly. It's the Woven City project just under Mount Mount Fuji. And um when, when the architect, the del presented the first kind of draft concept design actually said, you know, I really like what I'm seeing, but I don't understand what what it actually is. You know, I, I never, I never commissioned a city, a city, you know, uh uh I, I need to be able to, to feel it. I need, I need a holo deck. What, what's his reference, right? And then, and then them being Toyota, I mean, that's what they, what they did, right? They, they, they created a um a virtual experience space for him and the board to, to kind of fully immerse themselves in the, in the review process. Um because that was the only way really for them to understand, you know, what it is that they are signing off on. Um and, and really, you know, give them a better, yeah, a better understanding of now, this one is the most up to date uh project. And when I first saw this film, I thought you were making a Hollywood movie uh has all those ingredients, but it's, it's for the Neon Project. So once, once you have this real time model, you can use it in multiple ways. And the, the other way that we're using those models is uh in, in uh film studios where, where we uh in virtual production studios where we use them as backdrops uh or this is for an exhibition uh in, in Venice where people were able to explore, you know, how it would feel like to, to be in the line. Um And, and I think that's the beautiful thing about the technology that you can use it in all these different ways. But you've been on that project from the very early days, the development of things. So we, and again, did the client request to have this real time visualization. So we started working with Neo the week, the current CEO was made CEO so seven years ago and um it's a very complex project and there's actually many, many different projects in, in, in a piece of land, the size of Belgium. Um And so the only way really for the, the client to review and, and understand, you know, what they're getting into is to experience these things in, in, in real time. So it's very much a requirement. And in that case, we are, we are just, you know, projecting it on massive led walls. But, you know, for me, the the the reason why we're doing all this really goes back to, to a very simple uh fact that, you know, we all are amazing spatial sensors. I mean, we all are conditioned to feel spatial qualities. You walk into a space, you walk into a lobby for the first time and you instantly have a feeling you, you, you either feel this is a great space or, or you don't like it, right? And in today's world, you also tell all your friends the moment that you're feeling it, how you feel. So, so it's really this moment um when the failure or the success of, of any project really, you know, it gets decided. And so our ability to to virtually test the experience and, and to virtually kind of optimize the the performance of those spaces is is crucial. And, and today we are optimizing these projects in a, you know, virtually from a kind of commercial performance perspective and environmental performance perspective and also the experiential performance uh you know, is, is kind of what we are trying to, to simulate and to optimize for in this early stage because it's actually much easier to change anything you want at this early stage, much more complicated once you have poured concrete and installed screen sizes. Um So, and then the other question is, is kind of, I think, why, why is this happening now? And, and, and the fact is that all this was not possible until very recently. And, and you know, I made this very elaborate graph where I think that, you know, you could argue that there's always some sort of technical innovation happening. Um and then people have ideas but it doesn't always match, you know, how technology evolves. Um And then thirdly, there is some sort of wider socio-economic context that is happening and we are at the very tip of this, uh you know, for the next 3 to 5 years, you know, we are really experiencing this moment in time where the convergence of advances in gaming technology, machine learning and robotic automation, you know, it is really completely changing the, the the way that, you know, we are, we are working. Uh I I actually, you think we're really in that hotspot now where the three are, I mean, it has happened. So So we are right in the middle of it. Um And, and I think it's, we're just, you know, starting to see how radical of a change this actually is. I think it's an absolute fundamental change and everything is changing in, in, in, in the industry and in, in the good environment, it's absolutely changing the way we design, procure, build and operate our buildings and cities. Um And, and, and yeah, we're just at the beginning of this journey, but it's, there's no way back. Um And then the, what's next, you know, what, what, what's coming, it's already, you know, here in, in parts, but it will just become more visible, you know, in the, in the near future. I think we are, we are at the beginning of a uh um a development where I always thought, you know, so I'm a trained landscape architect who went into urban design and I think it's fair to say that over the last decade, we kind of forced designers to become technicians, you know, we needed them to code, we needed them to learn complex, you know, we operate complex software. Um And then there are also project managers and they are this and that and the other. And at the end, there is very little time to actually design something. So the technology was not really helping us as no. And it was just eating our time, I think and, and uh what we're seeing now is is a kind of wave of ambient computing which is coming where um we basically have won all these um assistance that are, that are helping us in the, in the background and making our lives easier. Um And, and as we are designing, I think, even if you, you know, start scribbling on an ipad at a very early stage, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to see the impact uh of, of your idea at this moment on the, the supply chain or your carbon footprint or the budget or whatever other, you know, uh thing you are interested in. And, and that is really another complete game changer because that's something that's freeing up the designer. It's taking a lot of that burden. I think so and it also should lead us to better design because at the moment, these things are quite um removed and we have actually in, in the build environment, we actually have divided the process in two phases where first we hire an architect or a designer to come up with a dream and, you know, we sell a vision and get everyone excited and get investment and whatever. And then we halfway in, we give it to a contractor and then we tell them now build this thing and by the way, this is your budget and here's your timeline and, and, and have a look what the supply chain is doing, right? And, and so a lot of the times what's getting built, you know, doesn't very much resemble what was, you know, designed in the first place. So I think it can only help to have this information a bit earlier in the, in the process and, and the, the, the promise really is, I think that all of this will help us to focus on, you know, what we are actually best at, you know, in helping us to, to design again. Yeah, fantastic. So make designers design again. That's almost Trumpian in its implicity as a message. It is. Yeah, that is fantastic. A wonderful insight into the work you and squint opera do. But a great message at the end, designers are now techno freeing designers to make them design again. Thank you so much. Thank you and see you later.

Frank Wu, Head of Design, JIYUE Auto Zhang Fan, Vice President and Head of Design, GAC R&D CENTER   Moderated by: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design And The Future Of Mobility

Minh Tran, VP of Operations and Academic Affairs, Goodnotes Anouk Sylvestre, Director Design, BCG X

Brainstorm Design 2023: Designing For Scale

Why the principles of design are critical for any new tech company. Anu Sylvester leads the design practice at BC GX Singapore where she advises corporate ventures and start ups. Min Chuan is currently the Vice President of Operations and A Affairs and good notes, a beloved digital note taking app that Wong Apple's 2022 app, ipad app of the year. So please welcome Anu Sa Min Tren and NCO less Gordon my colleague. The stage is yours next. So we we've heard a lot about um about big projects about big name designers and big companies. We want to kind of go a bit smaller scale for this session. Um So, Anu, you know, you work with BC GX, which is its new initiative to kind of work with these early stage companies, smaller scale start ups. Um Why is BC G deciding to work with these with this different kind of organization as opposed to kind of its probably more standard larger corporate clients? Oh, and you have some slides you have to show us. So actually the way how BC GX brings together those two worlds is by the team that is at the foundation of BC GX, we're all from sta start up backgrounds, founder backgrounds, but different disciplines. So, data scientists, um and designers, engineers, and what we bring to the table is that start up experience and we combine it with the corporate. So the the idea is that we really take all the good from the corporate assets and then bring that start up approach so that we can create innovative products and businesses. Um So really looking, what are the assets of the corporate and how can we propel them to find new problems to solve and using that methodology to make it happen? And so not only big fluffy new concept, we really make stuff, we want to make stuff that has impact, that changes people's lives and that also has transformative effects on businesses. Yeah. And, and we were talking earlier about this but the design questions at a start up versus a corporate like a big corporation, they're different. What are those differences? So I think one part is at the crux of anything. Is, is is there a problem to solve or a meaning to fulfill? Um when it's a founder that meaning can come from within, right? It's something that is meaning for, for myself when it's a corporate, that that distance, that perspective is sometimes hard to see. So what we do is as designers, we apply methodology to find a problem or a meaning that is worth solving with the assets that a corporate has. Um so that starting point is quite different. Uh One is more introspective and the other one is more OK, what are interesting target groups that we can look at and what problems do they have that the assets of the corporate can solve? And from there launch a new business and a new product. So I wanna bring in someone from a start up right now, Ming. Um So you're from Good Notes, Hong Kong based start up, you know, Hong Kong pride. You won the 2022 after of the year ipad app of the year award. I went to your office and I held that award. It's very heavy, very surprisingly heavy. Um But tell us a bit more about what good Notes design story is, how that app got it started and you also have something to, to show on screen as well. Yeah, thank you so much. Um We just want to show you what the app actually looks like since we're at the design conference. Um The app got started from our founder, Steven Chan when he was in college and he created Good Notes one by himself in his last semester of college in Australia. Um He is originally from Hong Kong and many people ask us what makes good notes different. Why do we win um app of the year compared to the innumerable other note taking apps out there. It's really our obsession with the user experience, the attention to detail. It sounds almost cliche to say that, but I really do think that's what sets us apart. How do we make the experience delightful and magical? Um And how do we get out of a user's way so that um it can be the experience as simple as they want it to be or as complex and elegant as some of our power users you've just seen do with the app. Um So good not to have thought about design early but um but a new, you know, I think, can I, oh, sorry, sorry. Oh, please. Just one more thing um on this um these numbers, this is show the scale, our session is on designing for scale. Um We started, as I was saying, with just Steven by himself and he worked by himself for five years. Um It's from 2011 to 2014 before he started hiring and today we've grown tremendously. Uh So we're everywhere where there is an ipad and we currently have more than 24 million monthly active users and that's quickly growing. And the number that astounds me the most is the fact that our users spend more than 70 minutes a day in our app. And that's because they're bringing the app from meeting to meeting, from session to session if you're here at the conference. Um And you can see there we are with Mr Cook himself, right? So, um so obviously an app that kind of brought design and design taking on early. Um But au you know, in your experience kind of working with start up, um it feels like I could, I could bet a lot of founders think design, I'll worry about that when I got the product, right. You know, let's get the product right first, then we'll worry about making it look nice and design it nice and, and whatever. Um I assume you think it's probably wrong. So, so, so, so what, what are some of the problems that happen if you don't bring, you know, your design thinking, your design chops and your start up early, it really depends how crowded the space is. So I think the the part that you cannot skip is is there a problem or a meaning that you're bringing? Um and that is a design skill in the sense is that empathy that understanding, but is it necessarily brought by a designer que questionable? I think a lot of us have naturally that, that talent and can add that value at an early stage as Stevenson has done. Um But you almost see it as a graph, right? So the more crowded the space, the more value design can bring. So let's say there's there's a space where OK, we have now different note taking solutions and now it's about making the best possible note taking experience. So that's when experience design starts to become really, really, really important and impactful, right? So I need I as a company need to stand out because I have the best note taking experience. And if you continue going up that slope where there's even more crowded space, then just a great experience alone won't cut it because the overall everyone has kind of nailed at that great experience. So that's when identity design comes in. I think there was a mention about this. Uh when we talked about cars earlier, there, there's a moment where that has flattened out the possibilities, that great experience. Now we need to boost up more of the esthetical values, emotional value so that a user will choose one noting tool over another because they identify with one more. And that's actually I want to bring in me here because because we talked about this earlier, um which is, you know, like design actually is a competitive advantage for apps. So what do you want to explain a bit more kind of how design has helped Good Notes make a name for itself in this very crowded space? Yeah. And for us, everyone is a designer at good notes, including our engineers, you know, we're at a design conference talking about why design is important. So it's quite obvious, right? Um But for, from my perspective, it's not just design um uh but it's also a great engineering because without great engineering, uh which is I think what often sets good notes apart, you can bring that design to life. Uh And we like to say that our designers can imagine anything and then our, our, our engineers can build it. Um But when it comes to finding what our users want, what our users need, um we bring in everybody from the beginning. So it's not just designers, talking user researchers, talking to, to users or non users, but its engineers as well and investing them at the from the beginning on these users stories, these user issues really also empowers the engineers to be problem solvers and solution seekers. So um that's what we love doing. A good enough if it's extremely collaborative. Um And speaking to your point about, you know, what, after you have great design, what sets us apart is that fan, I think, right? Uh Once you have that identity, that emotional connection to, to the experience, um there is that good note fandom out there and we engage with them and we try to, we do serve our fans and try to give them what they want. Um And, and those are really fun moments and, and I want to drill down on this point about, you know, design being a team effort in a second. But before I do that and I went to your office last week and I saw that you'd converted one of your meeting rooms into a classroom. So kind of how is this working for good notes, design future? How are you using this to kind of develop future services. Yeah. So we, we want to be as close to our users as possible and we want it to be a cove process. So we are building something new for teachers um which I can't spoil here on the stage yet. We'll save that for another day. But in but to build that, we wanted to have real teachers, real students coming into our, our and experiencing our uh app as that new product as we were building it. So it is, I mean, that's just fundamental good design uh principle, right? Being extremely close to you, to your users and co developing with them, that's when you, you know, for sure you're solving real problems. Um So I didn't want to talk about this like designs, a team effort point which has come up a lot, I think throughout the day, another point that come out a lot today is that a lot of these new tools are democratizing access to design ability, especially we all saw the sketches being turned into renders in a matter of minutes. Um And it seems like there there is this tension there where there is like it's a team effort, everyone involved in design, but also it's democratizing access. So you don't maybe don't even need superstar designers anymore. And I want to bring in a new to kind of talk about this, this potential tension a little bit between making sure everyone's qualifying design, but also having this like really big democratized access to design tools. So what the different tools are actually allowing us to almost increase that Venn diagram of each person. So if we think of, I love to think of teams, especially in our contact where it's very multidisciplinary, they're not separate circles, they have a high degree of overlapping. So for example, they all need to share that the around the problem, right? But what these tools are allowing us to do is that that overlap increases. Um It can be, for example, by the fact that A I tools allows engineers to be more visual, but a lot of tools are actually also allowing designers to cross more into the engineering boundaries. So for example, there are some amazing no code, local tools that are allowing designers to really push that testing phase more and more and more. So then the interaction between engineering and design actually happens more on par. It's more about are we solving, are we asking the right questions? Are we solving the real problems? And then who uses what tool to go and find out and de risk it that becomes almost secondary because there's such a shared pool of different tools that each of the parties can use. Um M again, we were we we were having kind of our, our, our pre briefing and you mentioned that that good Notes has a very low labor attrition rate. You'll be able to hold on to a lot of your employees um over time and I think I've read about a lot of different design forward organizations for companies that I also be able to do that. And it gives them the opportunity to both teach everyone the design framework that they have, but also giving them the space to experiment within that framework. And so how, what from your experience, the good notes, how important has it been to be able to, to hold on to your talent? Oh It's, it's everything, right. Our team is everything we cannot do anything without our team. Our success is it has everything to do with the incredible team that we have. Of course, it's important to bring in the fresh perspective. Um the outside experience, those are really important too. Um What our OG members, team members do for us is they have that institutional memory. They don't need to do a lot of research on what we've done because they were there. Um And they can so instinctively tell what isn't right based on our past experience. And that is so important in, in when we're going into um breaking new grounds but not losing our roots. Um Anu, you know, we are based here in Asia, in Macau. Um And so I wanted to get a sense from you. What are some of the differences that you're seeing between how Asia Based start ups versus non Asia Based starts how they're thinking about design? Do they approach the problems designed differently. Are they bringing on designers at different times? Are there any differences that you're seeing? So I've been now at this side of the world for, for a while and I'm actually really almost struggling to get away from it because of the incredible energy that companies have over here. Like there's such this much more willing to take risks and much more willing to experiment. And sometimes I think that I'll talk now for, in the case of Europe, I think we have a strong attachment to doing right to philosophizing very deeply on meaning. Um But sometimes if that takes too long and you're not able to create something and see what happens in the real world. A lot of this philosophy kind of falls flat and what I actually learned to really embrace here is finding that balance between getting it out, seeing if what I'm imagining or that whole beautiful strategy that I have in mind actually is converting. Is it making people relate more or talk more or have better social connections or not? Was that just a theory that doesn't apply? And then how do you find though that balance? Right? I think almost coming from, from a world where there's a lot of risk aversion and then moving into the side of the world where there's a lot of risk taking, you're almost like, oh, have we thought this through? OK, let's let's take it step by step. So how can you take that incredible energy but almost like take it bit by bit, especially in, in this context where we're using more and more risky technology that we don't know what impact they're going to have. So how can you can find that space to see what the real life impact is? But without it going haywire. So I want to close by talking about my favorite topic. Your favorite topic? Everyone's favorite topic. A I and I'll give it to a new first to kind of maybe expand briefly. You know, how is A I going to change how we think about start ups and design in the years to come. We didn't talk about designing A I products, which is different than using A I for design. Do you have any kind of quick thoughts on how that's going to change? Yeah. So yeah, I think slight reference before on using A I as tools to design better when it comes to building A I uh products. I think one of the theme that has come up uh today is um there's never been a technology that is so easy to implement as a POC. It's like, oh, I, I need to know if this technology is feasible. Actually, that part is relatively easy as compared to a lot of other technologies. The prob the the challenge is especially when it comes to um Ja I in a context of business transformation. So when you input that in the current flow, the the impact it has on, on the people. It's not just a tool like someone else mentioned, it's almost like inserting the superhuman person. And so therefore the way how a team interacts with a super superhuman versus a tool is very different. So I think we uh we need to demystify this idea of the problem of the technology. The problem is not the technology, the technology is an enabler to solve problems in a way that we have never solved before. But for them to effectively solve the problem, we need to understand how humans interact with this new tool to be able to actually make it happen, especially when it comes to business transformation, closing thoughts on A R. This is such an exciting moment and I, I think all of us are here for it. Um For good notes. What we're doing um with Gen A I is we launch in August. Um The world's first gen A I for handwriting where we can mimic your handwriting style with just one letter that you've written. Um So that is proprietary technology that we have launched. And what we're working on now is integrating uh external LLM that will allow us to make your library of content in good notes. Um A a an easier to access source so you can ask good notes for anything. Um And then we can gen you can imagine anything for you. So that is, that's going to be extremely powerful and useful for our users. What we've been talking about is how do you design the guard rails? How do you design the, the, the caveats to alert users that these are gen A I output? And that's also really well because I was asked about data security. I mean, um well, I want a gen A I to read all of my personal notes. I mean, is that also you think about like in terms of data, like where, where, where the, you know, how to handle all this personal data that's extremely important. Um And it's something that we talk a lot about uh we spend innumerable hours on data protection and also compliance, right? Many policymakers are still reckoning with how to regulate this. Um So we've been engaging with policymakers including the Minister Ministry of Education in Germany just this week, uh for instance. Um and, and, and so that's something that we have to take very seriously. Well, thank you, Anu, thank you m so for talking about how to use how it starts on you. You use design, use it early, make sure you get the product right early. Don't leave it till the last minute. I was like, get get your product wrong. Everyone, please. Thank Anu and Ming for sharing their insight today and move to the next session. Thank you.

Scott Doorley, Creative Director, Stanford d.school

Brainstorm Design 2023: Living With Emerging Technologies

When change is constant, the path ahead is full of uncertainty, the way we think about new technology will, will help unlock its vast promise and unearth its perils. Scott Doley is here to share new ways of thinking about and making the most of our ever emerging tech. Scott is creative director at Stanford D School and an expert working at the intersection of design and media. Please welcome Scott Doley. Thanks so much. I really appreciate the time. Uh Your time is valuable and uh I'm excited to talk for a little bit. So I'm gonna talk about emerging tech and uh I'll get into it in a sec, but I just want to share one thing before I do. Can I be honest right now? Um I'm a little nervous about giving this talk. Uh It doesn't end in the way I give a lot of talk, it doesn't end in the way they normally do. It ends kind of unresolved a little bit. And I'll be honest, I'm slightly uncomfortable with that. Um In fact, it ends with the sentence that is, that's an open question that I think we have to solve. So it's really really unresolved at the end. Now, I think that's ok. At least I'm trying to convince myself that's ok because I feel like we're in a moment right now where things, uh, don't resolve themselves quickly and I think we just have to get used to living with that. I think maybe that's the point is that we have to cultivate the skills to, to live in this unresolved world. Now, I've tried to fill it with lots of the talk with lots of practical takeaways. So I hope you won't be disappointed. But why don't we just dive right in? So I, as I mentioned, I'm going to talk about emerging technology. And often when we talk about emerging technology, we focus on the second half of that phrase, we talk about the technology that makes perfect sense because the technology that we're talking about, whether it be synthetic bio Blockchain A I is very powerful. But there's something about that first part, uh the emerging part that I think is worth spending a little time on because I think it's affecting us in an equal way. It's the technology. Just that constant change itself is kind of pushing us in ways that we're not used to. In fact, that word didn't used to be put in front of technology, it used to be new technology or just technology. So why is this uh emerging? I've got three questions to answer during the talk. One is about how, how that makes us feel the other is how we think about it. And the last is what we might do about it. So let's start with the first one. How does it feel? So, so to me, there's something particular about how emergence feels that we'll talk about right now. This is a graph on the bottom of the timeline. It's roughly the last century on the vertical, on the left hand side, that's the percentage of Americans that have adopted a new technology. Now, this is done for lots of technologies. We're looking at how fast do people in America adopt technology? Up to 80% of the population. We're going to look at the phone right now and start with all the versions of the phone. So first we've got the landline, landline starts a little bit before this graph. You can see it kind of has a little bit of a down slope. The slope is kind of a curve. Now let's go to cell phones. Um and I'm not talking about smartphones, I'm talking about dumb phones, the flip phones and brick phones and the like that starts off with a little trickle in the eighties. You know, these are the car phones, the big mobile phones, but for the early adopters, then it really does start to pick up and in about two decades, you're up to that 80% level. It's a little bit off the chart, but you're up to that 80% level. And then lastly, let's look at smart, so smartphones pose a similar pattern to the cell phones, but the uptake is a little bit quicker at the beginning and then it kind of rockets uh in, in under a decade up to that 80% level. Now, if we went even a step further and got to like the chat interfaces like clad and chas GP T um that would be just a sliver. It's not, I don't know that it's up to 80% yet, but it's on track to just be a sliver on the right side of that. Um So how does that make us feel? Is the question? Well, I work with a guy named Glenn Fajardo, kind of a brilliant guy and he has a framework that he uses to think about how that adoption feels and most technology starts as a nice to have. So you think about when the iphone came out, which was the first, you know, popular smartphone, it's kind of nice to be able to open up the maps and pinch and it was cool to have music in your pocket along with the phone and messaging, but it wasn't like a mandatory thing to do business. Um Over time that moves to what you can't ignore, right? So when the technology gets to, can't ignore stage to just actually function in society or in your work, you can't ignore it. You have to either just do it or decide specifically to opt out. Now what's happening now is the distance between nice to have and can't ignore is getting shorter, right? You can see that on the graph. Let's look at one more graph. This one's about A I, this is how fast the A is uh on, on different tasks can learn to be as good as a human at that task. So you can see, I don't even, this is a much shorter timeline. It's about 20 years. I don't have to get into all the details. But if you look at say like handwriting recognition which begins on the left has like a similar kind of slope to the landline as you go to the right, which are newer things coming out. Now you get to language understanding that's like a straight up with a little hitch and then a straight up, right? So it's following that same pattern. I think this is creating a certain type of feeling in us, this quick adoption that distance, shortening and the change in the improvement happening. And it's putting us in a situation where we're never up to speed, right? We're never up to speed. And if you take that and make it into an acronym, we have N for never ut si think you can see where this is going. It's nuts, right? It's making us nuts. Now. Now in American slang, uh there are a couple of definitions of nuts that I think are useful here one is that it's mentally disorienting. So, uh, if someone's playing a song that I don't, like, I might say that song is making me nuts. Right. It's not making me feel good. The other though is kind of the opposite. It means extremely alluring. So, like, if I have a song that I love, I might say something like, oh, my gosh, I'm nuts about that song. I'm nuts about that band. Right. So, on the one hand, you can think of the mentally, um, disorienting folks as being the, the pessimists and the extremely alluring folks as being the optimists. Um, but either way it doesn't really matter, the mental state is still this excited mental state and I don't know about you, but I don't make great decisions when I'm in an excited mental state. When I'm sort of mentally frustrated, I eat a lot of sugar and things I shouldn't eat when I'm overexcited. I make a lot of rash decisions that I shouldn't do. So, I think this is actually an issue that we're kind of like hyper, hyper, excited. Next. How do we think about it? So, how do we imagine what's to come is the question that I have. It's a really interesting question because we're actually not that good at this. You know, we don't know what the technology is going to do. We can't really totally understand it. So, what we have to do is take old mental models and put them on the new technology and see what comes out. So let's look at generative A I, again, there are lots of metaphors. I've been kind of collecting. This one is a representation of a calculator. For words, this one is particularly popular with some of my students. A calculator for words suggests that, oh, this is a tool we have it under control and it does our busy work for us. That's sort of what that metaphor reveals. On the other hand, I'm giving a lot out in the media that there's a, it's like these are like nuclear weapons, right? We there, there's an existential threat here. We need to have some treaties around how fast this moves, there's a political solution to it. And so that like highlights kind of the threat and the power of it. Now there are tons of other ones. Electricity has come up fire manufacturing. I've used one which is Margarine that maybe it's a synthetic thing that in the long run is going to turn out to be not so good for us. Who's right? Who's right? Which of these metaphors is right? The answer is, who knows? Because we haven't seen what it can do yet. And I think I would add, who cares? Because to be honest, it's not really about being right anymore. I think when we're in this never up to speed moment, what that means is we have to operate in ignorance. And so what we need to use these frames of mind for is not to make sure that we're right or wrong. It's actually to find the space that we're missing. And so the main thing is, it's both right. It's all of it, but we shouldn't get hung up on one too much because when we get hung up on one too much, it narrows our field of vision and we end up being stuck in that metaphor. So I think the goal here is just to switch switch frames of mind. OK. So now we're coming, coming to the end, what do we do about this right now? What or what now? What happens next? How are we going to make sense of all the opportunities and all the perils that are here? I've been playing around with what I call rules for emerging tech. I'm really interested in like, why are we lumping all these technologies together again, synthetic bio Blockchain A I? Why are we saying these are all emerging tech when we didn't say tech was emerging before? Um So what I'm looking for is a way that we can have a framework that allows us to have what I call the ability to respond. So the ability to respond is very similar to what my colleague, Sarah Stein Greenberg was talking about this morning in teaching students to be able to be adaptive learners. It's about, you know, developing the capacity to learn how to learn this has kind of become a phrase that's used all over the D school Cortland Butts who does equity work with us uses this phrase Lisa K Solomon, who does futures work with us uses this phrase. So in very different areas, this phrase is, is popping up. And I think the interesting thing is if we look at the peculiarities of this technology, it can help us get ahead of it. So I'm sure there are like 42 of these, I've come up with three. I'm still not even sure that they're right. These are hunches or hypotheses that I'm testing out, but let's work through those three right now. So we're going to look at the peculiarities of emerging tech. So one is that they continue to grow even after we're done with them. So you can see this very specifically in something like synthetic biology, right? Synthetic biology. It just literally keeps growing after, after we're done with it, you can see it in A I the way machine learning can kind of progress and can get smarter even after we ship it. Um So what does that mean for us, another colleague of mine, KSA Carter, who's the academic director at the B school. And I have been throwing around this idea for a while that actually maybe delivering products is going to look more like shepherding or farming than it is going to look like shipping. Now, we still use this mental of shipping when we're talking about even things like software and I think that's probably outdated. It's even outdated already. Right. Because software development is kind of a dress rehearsal for what I'm talking about with like constant version releases, beta testing, uh, constant debugging that when we push things out into the world, our responsibility is going to continue long after the shipping date. Um, and it, it, it, it seems like that should always have been the case, but frankly, it hasn't. So I think what you could do is if you're thinking about shipping a product, how do you create a nimble team that's going to be able to interact with that product over time? And again, it's already happening. Next one is they seem like us but they don't work like us. And I think this one can be, this one can confuse us a little bit. So they do a lot of human things. You know, if I go into chat GP T or I look at stable diffusion and create an image, it kind of looks like something a human could have made. But the way it actually happens is very different. You know, they get these huge pre training data with uh stable diffusion that's about creating noise and then subtracting it to get the image, which is not how a human does. That. The reason I bring that up is because we get so excited about the capabilities because the capabilities are so powerful, they they're actually lopsided and they have really weird vulnerabilities. So this is going on San Francisco right now with the um driverless taxis, people who are kind of not in favor of this are taking traffic cones and putting them on the hood and that stops the tra the taxi debt in its its tracks. And so it's just like a weird vulnerability that it has. So in terms of, of um putting things out to the world, I think what this means is that we are not just thinking about the features, but thinking about the faults. We're actually designing features and faults. At the same time again, this probably should have been done for years and it's increased in popularity. And I've heard a lot of people talking about it today, but I think that's like the critical shift there. And then uh Sarah and I have actually been talking about this, the side effects come along with the effects. So let me give just a quick illustration of that. Uh This is Carl Sagan, the scientist in 1985. He's speaking to Congress about what was then called the greenhouse effect that we now know as climate change. This is over a century after the industrial revolution. So the effects of the the side effects of the industrial revolution took that long to come into play. This is a similar moment. This is Frances Haugen also talking to Congress about this time, her concerns with social media and how it was affecting teens and then also how it's affecting society. This is less than a decade after the shift in social media that a lot of people think sort of spawned these issues, right? So that distance between when an effect happens and when the side effect happens are getting shorter, I think, you know, again, just recently, um Sam Ullman was in front of Congress talking about the worries about uh generative A I which had only been released with under a year at that point. So they're getting closer and closer and closer. I think you could think of this as a, as a major problem and it is uh as a big concern. But I actually think there's a silver lining in this one, which is that when things are changing at that rate, it's actually easy to perceive what's happening, right? Because you can very quickly see the causes and effects. So it actually makes it easier to act. The other thing is I think it really lowers the cost of investing in a hunch because if you invest in a hunch, you can validate it more quickly if those changes are happening in succession like that. All right. So, um so I mentioned that there wasn't going to be a big resolution and this is the moment of, of non resolution. Um What I want to say is, uh there's, I'll just, I'll just begin with a quote. Um or I'll end with a quote, I guess there's a French philosopher, um named Paul Valerie and he ha he has a quote that just like sticks in my brain. Uh And I repeated it all the time. He was dealing with emerging tech when he said it, his emerging tech was radio in the 19 thirties. And what he said is, can the human mind deal with what the human mind has created? And I'm not sure all the time, I'll be honest, like sometimes I feel like, no, absolutely not. Other times like today, I feel like, yeah, you know, if we can develop this ability to respond, if we can get comfortable, never being up to speed and kind of getting in touch with the things that we don't know. Uh Yeah, I do, I do think the human mind can respond to it and we can be a little bit less nuts, but to be totally honest, uh I think that's an open question that's for us to solve. Thanks so much.

Brainstorm Design 2023

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design for Good

Latest video

Ben Sheppard, Partner, McKinsey & Company Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills Moderated by: Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Brainstorm Design

Videos (21 videos)

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design for Good

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design Leadership

Brainstorm Design: When Androids Dream: Ai, Art And The New Marketplace

Brainstorm Design 2023: How Ai Is Transforming Architecture

Brainstorm Design 2023: A Conversation With Tina Norden

Brainstorm Design 2023: Yes, We Can: Reimagining An Iconic Brand

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design’s Next Chapter

Brainstorm Design 2023: Four Foundations For An Unknowable Future

Brainstorm Design 2023: How To Use Data To Create Better Cities For Everyone

Brainstorm Design 2023: The Power Of Sketching

Brainstorm Design 2023: Designing Spectacles

Brainstorm Design 2023: Problem Solving At Massive Scale Future

Brainstorm Design 2023: Welcome

Brainstorm Design 2023: A Deep Dive With Tom Dixon

Brainstorm Design 2023: Macau’s Design Future

Brainstorm Design 2023: Small Spaces, Big Ideas

Brainstorm Design 2023: Leveraging Ai’s Power

Brainstorm Design 2023: Enhancing User Experience With Digital Twins

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design And The Future Of Mobility

Brainstorm Design 2023: Designing For Scale

Brainstorm Design 2023: Living With Emerging Technologies