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

Brainstorm Design 2024

Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills, Ben Sheppard, co-founder and Chair, Design for Good , Moderator: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends 

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design for Good

Conferences

Pichit Virankabutra, Deputy Director and Acting  Director of the Chiang Mai Office, Creative Economy Agency, Thailand, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Spotlight On Thai Design

Thank you, welcome, welcome, welcome. I drink some water to complete the work. So just out of curiosity, how many people in the audience have been to Bangkok? Oh, almost everybody. So now let me ask a more specific question. How many people have been to cumbent? Oh, a lot of people. OK. Almost everybody that's been to Bangkok has been to to come. But how many people have been to? What is it? Shalom is the next one, the the the district next door? Yeah. And how many people have been to Charon? I know this district? 122, only two. OK. So this is going to be interesting. Um This is one of the great uh revival stories uh of, of Asia and I think it's not uh as well known as it ought to be. Uh Chong Kong is one of uh Bangkok's oldest original neighborhoods. And uh Kita has been uh the leader of this effort to uh it's kind of fell on hard times for a little while. And then uh you've been the leader of this effort to try to use design design thinking to uh re invent it and help breathe new life into it. Uh And it's a lovely, it's a lovely story and I think it has interesting implications for uh Macau where we are right now and, and other cities as well. So let's um let's go back a little bit of history and tell me about Chong Kong and where this neighborhood comes from and what's, what's special about it. So maybe I'm not going back to the very fact that we talk behind the the stage. Um J right now is 100 and 60 years old um road. Um It was like the first road in Bangkok. So this is like a prime area. It was the place of, of Bangkok in 100 and 60 years ago. Everything was there. Um The bank was there, the hotel was there, the tram was there, the tallest building was there, which is seven story. So everything was right in the middle of the Rangoon and it carry on until like the past 40 years, Bangkok has expanded gradually into like a mega city right now. If if anyone has visited in Bangkok, Bangkok is a mega city. So Durran was abandoned. It's like deserted area because most of the houses are Chinese owned and the third generation will will carry on the the the ancestors um place, they won't sell it, but they won't use it. So it's like all, all, all of the area was closed down a lot. Ok. So um I'm gonna try to fill in some of the details here. If I get it wrong, you can, you can correct me. But um a couple of interesting things happened uh in Asia uh uh in, in the 16 seventies, we can go back that far. One was uh something that happened in Chaozhou, which is uh a region that's just up the coast from where we're sitting right now. And it was famous for having uh people that were very entrepreneurial, that were seafaring people that were great traders and that traded up and down in ships to Southeast Asia. Uh The uh forgive me for, you know, maybe too much history. But the Ming dynasty which was Han Chinese collapse, it was overtaken by the Manchus and the Qing dynasty and southern China, particularly the area around uh uh Chaozhou was kind of one of the last rebel holdouts of the, of the Ming. So there was all kinds of instability there uh caused famine, poverty and there were a series of natural disasters. So there was pressure on that population to leave and find another place to live, followed the trade routes down uh and, and got to Thailand. So in Thailand, this really interesting thing was happening, the Aut uh dynasty had been toppled by an attack from neighboring Burma and the major general general Thaksin uh became the king, moved to the city 50 miles down river. And it was really the beginning of what is now modern uh Bangkok um and transformed this foreign village into kind of an imperial capital. And he was partly Chinese and he was uh he needed a coalition of people to keep him uh in power. So he reached out to the Ch Ch Chinese from Chaozhou, who were already providing a lot of food and creative spices to this uh new city. And he gave them a huge plot of land that became Chinatown. Cha Kong is the neighborhood that sort of just adjoins Chinatown. Uh And um it became the center of, of, of commerce and, and markets and diplomacy and everything for the city. And when finally, uh Thailand opened up to trade with the West in the 18 fifties, there was just a flood of Western uh traders and diplomats and uh uh people that, that came in and they needed a place to kind of set up shop. And so that's why it became the first location of the first road instead of, you know, traveling around by boat, up and down the chara, they had a road, they had a cable car, you know, lighting on the streets. It was spectacular in every respect. But then the investment boom in the eighties and nineties and Itand it into a place just kind of left this district that had once been of the grandest districts in all of Bangkok behind. Uh So very interesting to me to see so many people still have been to Sukhum that but they have not been to the district where it really kind of all uh all started. So talk to us a little bit about what happened when the, so the Thailand has this very progressive design uh bureaucracy. If you want to call it that, it's an agency called the Thai Thailand Creativity and Design Center that group p works with and they put their headquarters uh in this neighborhood and talk a little bit about that. If you can, we'll see if we can get some pictures here so people can. So this is like where I work is the Creative uh Creative Economy Agency, which is government agency working with um 15 creative industries. And one of the new mission when we relocate ourselves from the other side of the road to this old neighborhood is about district development as lots of various Europe uh uh American cities that trying to revitalize, regenerate um rundown areas. So this was the initiative from the government, see if we can. So this is where I work, look posh with all the resource center, with the view and everything. So this is a spectacular building and what you can see kind of from this side on the kind of lower right hand corner here is that it's, it's in the, it's at the edge of this very curious building. What say something about the the larger where it's been housed inside. Actually, this is like the Grand Postal building built in 19 forties. And, um, we, it was abandoned, actually, maybe I'll go through this. So this is all the, all the area of the new banks is there, the, the, all the embassies is here. Um, you can click throughout. So this is like the, the place where everything happens and for at the area that's like, um, the Grand Postal building that was actually the center of communication to Bangkok at the time. And we are looking um at this area that survived World War Two bombing, things like that. And it was the Grand Postal Building for ages. We know the area, the area is called the Grand Postal area. So if you call a taxi, you say this is the word for the area. And when the Grand Postal, um when the Postal company also abandoned the building because the building is too small for the corporate. So they move out. And the next slide will see like this is what what is was abandoned at the time. So no one operated, it was like really abandoned with, with with broken windows and everything. So in 2017, we relocated ourselves and we regenerate, we regenerate the building, we saw the building and just now what we've seen is the Thailand Creative and Design Center inside with the resource center with all the services for the creative industries. And from this on, this is the pinnacle of the area that will be shifting. Um projects for revitalizing Terran area. It's a wonderful art deco building that's been designed by local architects really quite unique when you decide it. So talk to us a little bit about what you did when you moved into this neighborhood to kind of figure it out when we move in. It's like as I mentioned, it's a ghost town. We can't find even lunch. It's difficult. You have to go like an hour like you, you you have to go by taxi out of town, out of the area to to to get lunch, things like that. So the first thing that we done is data collecting. So we we went knocking all the doors to see whether this place is a commercial area, which is a residential area. Where's the hotel, where's the mosque, the church, the the temple. So we collect data to see whether, how vacant is it, how is it occupy things like that during the eight years, we just kind of figuring out who your neighbors are. I mean, classic design process. So what are we looking at here? Like for this thing? I think it is parallel. When we collect all the data, we found that lots of places are run down buildings. So it's like uh a project that we were looking at strategy of place making. So eventually during the year, we will try to approach new places to see whether it could be used um to see whether it is the, what you call the structure is, is good enough for, for rental, things like that. So we try to connect and, and maybe like in Design Week, we, we will try to rent out the area to see whether it's possible to, to give an idea that buildings could be used. Ok, great. So what are we looking at here? So this little uh logo uh in brown here in the brown circle made in Chong Kong. This thing came a bit later because when, when Charan Kong was, when we relocated, we have we run um design ring in the area to prove that there's potential and possibilities of people coming in. The thing that we found is the 30 years old, 50 years old, 80 years old um um businesses in the area could not sell things to, to the new visitors because there's a younger generation coming in. So the Met in general was was imposed to as a design center. We have designer in our left hand, we have the old business on our right hand. So we meet them up to come up with new services, new products that were to new visitors. So the med intern was like implement, I think the fourth or the fifth year right now and they create new products for new generations, new visitors, right? So you have all these little kind of mom and pop businesses, right? That are, that are in the neighborhood, they're producing cool things, but they don't have much marketing, some of them right now online, some of them now in department store because we have like the business development department that works with them. Great like that. So interesting though. So you go to these people and say, hey, design, marketing design design, it won't work if this won't work. You need to, to look over the whole journey of, of businesses, things like that to to tell us about these portraits because I think that this story is really quite touching and and revealing the district branding in a way. I believe everyone working on, on, on regenerating district. The working with people is one of the toughest, the community is the toughest thing. So we came up with an idea that how to break and the break icebreaking for, for people. So the idea of the portrait of the room was imposed in, in this, this this this um context. Um We, it's an easy project. Um We film um 80 families in Terran area and we use the photos as a display in large public area across Terran Room and we have like a content of it. What that, that, that we could, could um introduce them to the public. So this is like things that people haven't expected that they will be displayed in, in public area, in large, in large places, things like that. And some of the, I think half of the families that that was in this program, they didn't have a family photo for over 30 years. So it's like, it's a, it's a, it's a little story of small family but it, it made them have a sense of ownership. They have a sense of place. And right now when we would like to do anything with them, it's easy because they know us, we know them and they are proud that they are people of group that is so great. So Andrew earlier this morning, Andrew Lazarro uh said something that I thought was quite profound was, you know, the importance of design, helping people feel seen. And this is essentially what you did. You went took the portraits of these families, you help them kind of brand themselves and you validated and celebrated them and that won their trust. Yeah, I think really important for us. Trust is a new currency for us. It is a that we, we use to trade because they have to trust us, we have to trust them. And, and this thing helps us to develop a new projects because um what we are doing is a people centric is a, is a community centric. Everything we do, there will be the people that we, we will work with. So they need to trust us and we need to trust them in a way. So instead of being suspicious of so they became your your allies in this project because before that, this is quite important because this was before we relocated, we have the co creator and whom we talked to 500 people over the span of eight months to see whether what are the needs, what are they expecting? What are the needs to see whatever they, they would like to see a design center moving into their neighborhood and you really work hard to sort of integrate the different segments of the neighborhood as well. Yeah, it, it's a span of a hun uh 1.5 kilometers framework. And actually if you see the green uh stroke, some of it was redesigned to to connect the small alleys because most of the opportunities are on the main road. But the green, the green small alleys was like for people less resourced and less less fortunate to to. So this, I think we are helping them make it easier for people to circulate in the in the neighborhood. Now talk about the role of design. The design week actually, is it like this um um conference that is about experimenting is about a laboratory. We use a design week different from maybe the design week in other countries because we look at as a lab. So it's a laboratory that we will try to see whether in this 1.7 kilometers area which normally no one comes, it goes down with a design week with a program with, with, with everything those people come. So the first edition of The Bangor design week catches like 400,000 people during the nine days. So it it it made people amazed with, with the number and people were were in the area. So it built trust in a way for businesses to maybe relocate it themselves. Projects is like like this that we're looking at like the part on the on the river, things like that. It is about issues on on green space in Thailand in Bangkok is really so design wing is like to open conversation with, with the governor, with people who look no place for green space on land. There will be green space almost like pop ups and yeah, that's all pop up. It's it's meant to to be a lab, a kind of lab to see whether people come in some of the programs for communities like a community karaoke so everyone could sing together and things like that. So we change the kind of mood and spirit of the. So you talked a little bit about lighting, the lighting, I think everyone has in every country. I believe lighting installation and lighting festival is always there. But for us, we we don't look at us as it as a lighting festival. It's the frame of of the brief. We're looking at how a small alley could compete with Children grung also. So the lighting was plot as as a answer to the question that how small alleys could compete with main roads, things like that So it was displayed along or even with this. Um This is for us, is the, the, the, the great grandfather of everything because um back then eight years ago, Thailand urban designers never had their project realized in, in the city. And this was like it took two years in the design week to fetch. Um um uh What do you call approval from the B MA the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration? Because right now we have prototype labs, see how people react, things like that. And we, we present it to the mayor and the mayor says, OK, for the first year, what's next, the next year? We we have it prototype as with the material, things like that. So right now it's like the great grandfather project with, with the government which built a bridge for designers, creative urban designers to work and realize that project in the city. So these, these sort of signposting, you know, how outsider helping outsiders to get to the neighborhood, find their way around. Uh you know, really quite amazing. I'm going to skip through this. Um And maybe I'm just going to put up this last slide. So you were saying something to me interesting the other day that this was mainly meant to be something that was to open Chong Kong back up to the local Thai community. But what's interesting is I just pulled, you know, we pulled these last night from, from the Western media. This is kind of now, the Brooklyn of Bangkok, right? Uh Look at these headlines, Bangkok, Sharon Krung Road City's oldest district now, Hippus is an makeover that brings new hotels and bars, galleries and street art. Uh This one at the bottom is the New York Times uh travel magazine, a huge spread there with some amazing photos. Uh You know, you've gotten all kinds of great uh press in the global media uh as a result of your efforts, uh uh We were down there a few months ago and visited Kun Chakra. Uh The design center is spectacular and there is a wealth of cool galleries and hip hotels and cafes, all kinds of Michelin starred restaurants. Now within just sort of a stone's throw of the design center, it's really cool. Actually, we didn't expect an approach from international, but actually, we work actually with working with the community and see how its creativity and design could prove for the community, the social and the economy. So that was what we the the real purpose and attempt that, that we were trying to achieve. Well, it sounds like a lot of things came together at once, but to be able to kind of have a revival of that magnitude in just a, you know, two or three years, three years. Amazing. And it's very encouraging case study, I think lots of uh of other cities and you know, design may only have been a part of that. But what I love about this story is that you can really see that the conscious efforts that you made to understand the community and then to kind of reach out and see what can we do to help them and use design to make this place more accessible? Have been a spectacular success. So congratulations convince. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

Anthony Lo, Chief Design Officer and VP of Global Design, BAIC Group, Frank Wu, Chief Design Officer, JIDU Auto, Wang Fang, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Shocked!

As Tony said, uh China's auto industry is leading a global ev transformation. When they do that, they're increasingly um hiring big name designers from their Western competitors. And we're very happy to have two of such designers with us today. Um Friends, uh sorry, Anthony, let me start with you. You've had this uh legendary career that stretches across continents, countries, brands. And now you recently joined the IC in Beijing Auto, um a Chinese car maker. So share with us a little bit of your journey. Tell us your story. Yeah. Uh Thank you very much for a short introduction, introduction. I'm Anthony Low. I've been working in this industry for quite a while. Started, started off as a young boy falling in love in love with cars and I knew how to draw. So I thought that would be the perfect job. And I started working at Lotus in England many, many years ago, I worked for Audi for a while in Germany and then followed by a stint with Mercedes Benz with General Motors in Europe and also with uh you know, at that time, General Motors used to have a company called S A uh it is not no longer around, but it's, I really enjoyed the period over there. And then in 2010, um I got recruited to John in France. It was my first uh I would say experience for working in France and it was not a destination that I thought about go ending up. And I really enjoyed my, my period over there. And uh because this was a time that when the company was really in need of a refresh uh from a design perspective, we um we had a clean sheet, you know, we can do anything we want but respecting the uh the history, the heritage of the brand and, and that, that was really, I, I stayed in the end 11 years. It's the longest stint in my career and I ended up living in France for, for a long, longer time. And then just before uh joining bike group, I spent some time in uh at Ford uh also being their chief design officer uh for Global Design. Uh This was something that I, again, my first time apart from GMGM, I was based mostly in Europe. I spent more time in Detroit, in Irvine and other global design centers that are also in Melbourne, Shanghai, Germany uh in Cologne and London. So it was great experience to understand, kind of learn a little bit about the uh the global uh uh you know, the different locations, different product lines that are in fact, very different from, you know, stuff that you, you, you can find in Europe and in America and in China, they are all, all very, very different. Uh So I think uh and then in uh if you can click to the next, uh I, I just joined by uh actually in October. So there's not a lot yet I can share, but things are happening really fast. And uh because the, the pace in uh in uh develop a new car is a lot faster than what I'm used to. In fact, I've been, you know, doing this for a while. So in bike, uh we have um I want to bring my, you know, global experience to the bike group uh being um you know, learning how other companies do it, especially from a strategic level. I want to bring my experience to kind of make the brands that are on the bike group, the Beijing brand up Fox and the, and the recently launched the Lotto brand. Uh they are, they are all really, really amazing products. Uh But I think we want this, these brands to develop further, maybe, you know, going into other markets in the world. So it's really, really exciting time. I'm I'm happy to be joining the group right now. So the key question I think everybody has in their mind is what about bike that has attracted you back to China? Yeah, I, I feel that, you know, the industry is going through big changes. Uh I think the uh we all heard about, you know, electric car, new energy vehicles being kind of also in China is leading. But in fact, I, I think it's um we, I I'm really happy to be at the, at the forefront of uh you know, innovation. I, I think I found, I believe I found the right partner and they found me as well. So I, this is really a good moment and I really uh so far uh in my 1st 2.5 months, uh everything has been going great, right? You touched upon the very fast pace that Chinese auto industry is going through uh the the very quick cycles that we turn cars around. So, um but we will come back to later on that Frank, how about your story? Tell us a bit more about your story, your journey. Um So, first of all, I'm really, really honored to be on the same, same stage with Anthony. So Anthony, he's a legendary designer. So it's a huge privilege to be able to share the, the story in our journey. Um For me, II, I grew up in the States most of my life since I was six. Um So ever since, you know, studying automotive design uh in university and then later on uh practicing as a professional car designer at General Motors and also for a Cadillac brand. Um it was a very, very special and very important journey of my career uh milestone. Um And then later on, I actually moved to China and then realized that it's a very, very new transitional period for the automotive industry. Um And I can see also in this slide, there's a lot of new trends that are happening in the auto industry for us. Um the way we look at it is there is a 1.0 era where it's the IC era of automobile design. And then today we're looking at the 2.0 era, which is the era of EV. And as everybody can understand that EV is becoming a majority market that's taking over a lot of the ice vehicles in the global market position. Um And at J do what we're focusing on is more of a 3.0 era, the era of A I vehicles. So how can A I vehicles be able to utilize artificial intelligence, A G I and also autonomous driving to be able to bring a better sort of a lifestyle and also driving journey experience to the future drivers and also passengers. Uh for the new era of the about JJ is a joint venture between uh Baidu, which is sort of China's Google and Ji Li, which is perhaps China's board. So uh let's come back to you and uh more about A I and how cars are becoming more uh um intelligent. So, Anthony, I want to come back to you you've worked for so many car brands. You've designed so many models. You've seen so much change in auto design. I know you've prepared a few slides about the latest trends of car design. So just can you go through with us all these beautiful slides and tell us what are the trends? Yeah, I actually, I just made a very quick personal selection of, uh, you know, 2024 car trend. I focus on styling, not so much on technology and so on. Uh But I think what, what I find um you know, interesting is that how cars have become really sim a lot simpler in terms of styling. Uh you know, things are really modern flushed, you know, things that every designer was dreaming of doing is uh you know, trying to make all things, all the details, more integrated, something quite difficult to do uh in the kind of the earlier era of manufacturing. Uh for example, making things uh high quality, you know, 100,000 times. Uh uh uh you know, in the in the manufacturing process is not so easy, but I think I'm glad to see that really is coming online now with all the new products. But at the same time, I think I also see that some um uh I don't want to call them. Uh I would say something kind of design style in the past, but I think there's a period that when design uh the every manufacturer was tried trying to create more attention by exaggerating certain details, by, by making things a bit. Uh I would say unusual in terms of proportions to able to, you know, generate more attention from customers and hopefully that will create more sales. But I think this, this period, I can see that this is really changing and fading out. Uh If you go ahead and go to the next slide very quickly. Um uh There's also I think what, what I find uh extremely um uh interesting is in China, there's really emerging car culture, I call this just simply China car culture. In fact, for example, the uh car interior or the car itself, it is a technology carrier, it's always connected and, and it's also a place that we you can work, you can play and cars are being sold in mobile phone, uh laptop showrooms very different in, in shopping malls. And also the fact that three generations are often traveling together in China and cars become big. It's like your like an extended room, uh like your 1st 1st space and you can relax, you have zero gravity seats, you can even do yoga. And one of the reasons that you can do all of that is because the EV architecture is a much more uh I would say simpler flatter platform that you can actually create an unexpected layouts and you can cater for the needs of customers. But I see that this is this is this kind of trend is very dynamic because uh uh you know, in, in, in China, there are lots of new, new needs popping up here and there as designers, we always have to follow closely the market, but also keep doing research to really understand where we are heading next. And that's something that um I think we we all going to see um um coming in a few years. And another, another trend I would call it homogeneous styling. Is this something we um I noticed in recent trips to China, there are so many new cars everywhere. Um And, but I kind of couldn't figure out which brands they belong to. And one of the reason this is my personal uh assumption, but uh I think many car designers would agree with me is that because of the development time of a new product, it's really, really fast. I'm talking about less than half the time of traditional O Ems in other parts of the world. And because of that, you don't really have a lot of time to actually come up with all new ideas. So you always tend to kind of like, OK, let's let's go fast and let's choose something that is a little bit more uh I would say safer, something that yeah follow maybe not so much the trend but something you are in your comfort zone. And when you notice that maybe another brand has a car that is selling well or maybe we can do something similar to that because there's no time. And I think every designer that I know all wanting to create something much more unique, something that actually help, help create a stronger identity so that you can be more successful in, in over time. So I think that that's something that is happening. But if you go to the next slide, I think you can see that even more so on the interior. Uh I, I think these are all six car entire interior of six different brands. And uh I think it's very hard to tell which one they are. Until you zoom into the center of the steering wheel, then you will see the logo and then you go OK. That's, I think again, this is a uh a similar uh situation with exterior because uh with, with us interface with the, with the screen size, these are all kind of becoming a standard right now. So I think the future to be successful, like all well well developed, I would say mature markets. I think we need to create more unique identities and both on the interior exterior and the overall user experience. Great great point about uh how fast paced sometimes compromise the unique characteristics and identity of the car brand. Uh You touched upon something that's really interesting. Um China's auto uh design um has only recently been sort of quite well known to the world and it almost coincides with the emerging eb industry. So these things happen um almost at the same time time simultaneously. Uh As you mentioned, that's because um without the combustion engine with only the batteries that the car structure becomes simpler. So allows designers to put more um function and form into it. So um Frank, you work with technology more a little bit more, you make cars more intelligent. So tell us what you do is doing what you do at G do. So shall we have a look at your? Yeah, sure. Um So quickly put together a very quick um clip. Um So to follow up with what Anthony said, absolutely agree. The way I look at it is, I think cars are now going towards what the mobile used to be the um the iphone era. So we used to look at the Nokia 8800 and the Motor Love V Seven used to be super cool. I remember I, you know, um used to look at all these very cool stylized phones but then the the smartphone era really was when the iphone uh introduced sort of this intelligent experience through the apps and all that sort of hm I functions uh to connect all the life sort of lifestyle experiences into your pocket and then that kind of changed everything. And then the way I see it is Virginia, we're aiming to try to deliver almost like the iphone era of the automobile in terms of intelligent experience. And um to what Anthony mentioned about is a lot of the design now has becoming more uh simple. And I absolutely agree because um I just want to kind of clarify as for, for car design or for many other design to, to be simple is actually much harder. So it's not the word simple as in you're actually deleting all the context and all the contents. But how do you create something is so pure? Um That is less, is more but be able to deliver more with less. So the way we want to deliver is um before we design our products, we first think about what is our mission. One of the most valuable thing in any human's life is time. So time is something that we can never get back. Um And then how do we spend our time with our families? Our time commuting from work to home, from home to anywhere else is that we want to introduce the best user experience with the best autonomous driving technology utilizing, for instance, by this Apollo's L four Robotaxis technology into our vehicle, getting rid of all the hardware, but having the most pure design even getting rid of the traditional door handles or as you guys can see for the interior, we got rid of almost all the plastic buttons. And then we want to utilize the most natural interaction which is voice, you know, we talk to each other every day by having a natural conversation. So, using the A G I intelligent sort of, hm, I, you can just have any sort of command with the vehicle, like a robot and then the vehicle can open a door, close the door, come and pick you up from your house and then take you straight to work without you worrying about driving or the anxiety of driving. So you can actually spend more time talking to your friends, your family or just do whatever you want to do during that hour or two hour commute on a daily basis. And over the course of one day, one month, a year, five years, you get to accumulate so much time, that's so valuable in terms of that concept. So we're very, very proud to be able to uh aim to deliver that vision to the to the audience, right? I can see Chinese car makers are really at the frontier um of not only using clean energy but making cars not only just more stylish, more comfortable, but more intelligent. So I want to come back to, to you Antony. Now you're leading you the chief designer at B I AC bike, uh this huge state owned conglomerate uh which has like multi brands, multi series of models. What what is your uh your plan, your uh for this um gigantic car makers to um be able to compete, for example, with nimble um more, I mean, nimbler newcomers start up. Uh Like J Yeah, I think there, there are lots of uh I would say processes that are already kind of quite, quite working well and within by a group. Uh I think what, what I can bring in is, you know, things that uh maybe because of the speed um you, we cannot just always just be spontaneous and try to create something on sport. I think you need to be well prepared, you need to create a stronger design strategy. I think this strategy needs to kind of be also more extensive and not just looking at the identity or the the silhouette of a car or the shape of a car. I think this is maybe more of a more old school strategy that you design certain elements that you just keep replicating but um replicate them and but the I think strategy is is more about um you know how you can make with our three brands that cover, you know, Beijing is a four by four off road, has a strong four by four off road. Heritage Fox is relatively young. I think it's about seven years old uh EV or new energy brand. And then you we have also Stella which is we are aiming to compete in the luxury world, uh like Mercedes and, and, and BMW. So, so I think that they are very distinct brands. I think I would like to make sure that they have distinct character distinct offers, distinct user experiences and then create also a vision that can also help us, you know, into the next uh 56 years. Um You know, it's something different from how I used to work. I always used to think about 10 years and beyond. But I think now you have 18 months, 18 months, but you need the, the product will stay on the market for at least six years, 56 years. So you need to think of this kind of time span slightly differently. And I think that that's something I would like to do. And what do you think would be your biggest challenge? I mean, at this um cutting throat like competition. Yeah. Yeah, I, I think we, there's danger of being kind of mimic each other's success when you see a product or brand doing well, you try to do the same, but you are always two years behind. And so I think we have to have enough confidence as, as a, as a, you know, buy a group is, as you said, it's huge. It's been around for a long, long time since 1958. So I think we should have enough confidence to kind of do our own, uh have our own vision of products and experiences. And I think that will be a big challenge to kind of align maybe everyone in the company to, to want to go that way and sometimes perhaps dare to slow down a little bit. I fully agree. I think we, we don't need to introduce too products, maybe to do the right products for the right brand. I think that's something I believe strongly. Thank you very much for, I mean, the two gentlemen pushing the boundaries of auto design, not only just the style form and function and intelligence. Uh You have shown us how in the future of transportation looks like. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Teman Evans, Chief of Global Design, General Mills, In conversation with Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Brainstorm Design 2024: Somethin’ From The Oven’: Redesigning A Cultural Icon

Peter Kindel, Cities and Climate Lead, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: ‘Biomorphic Urbanism’ and Cities of the Future

Thank you, Nick Peter. Welcome. Thank you so much for uh Hi, everybody. Um It's a real honor to be here with uh with you Peter. Um I'm a great admirer of your work and, and really look forward to kind of diving into some of it uh Here this afternoon. Um Let's just start by talking a little bit about. Uh uh So M skidmore, owings Merrill, this is one of the most storied architecture practices in the world. Tell us a little bit about the scale and the type of work that it does. Yeah. So I think maybe many of you have heard of som those of you in the architecture field uh were a 88 year old um design firm started in 1936. Um And uh some of the major buildings we've done are Burj Khalifa in Dubai, uh Jin Mao Tower here in um in Shanghai and many other projects in China and Hong Kong area. Um And I think what's unique about som is we've tried to maintain a collaborative um design studio between architects, uh structural engineers, mechanical engineers. So it's a very integrated approach to architectural design and I think that's led to some of these iconic structures that we've been able to create. Um along with that we do have a, what we call the City Design practice, which I'm a member of, which is our um design studio that's uh manages large scale projects. Let's talk a little bit about that. Tell us about your, your role and you know what, what it means to be the city lead at uh at Good morning. Yeah. So, I mean, we've heard all day today about design at various scales in various uh guises. Uh So I designed probably at the largest scale possible, which is really at the city scale. We don't often design cities from scratch that, that really doesn't happen in my profession. But what we do is parts of cities or components or uh districts often times um for both uh city leaders and uh private developers. Uh So you may know Xin TDI in Shanghai, that was a big development in the late nineties, early two thousands, very well known that had to do with cultural conservation as well as new development. So that, that's the type of scale that we work at. Um But um my background is also as a landscape architect. Um And so I have this natural interest or affinity with um ecosystems and that's really what's led to what we'll talk about today, which is the integration or relationship of urban design and ecosystems. It's a great segue to kind of take a look at this concept of uh we get the slides up there, there it is uh of, of biomorphic urbanism. Uh What is that? Can you explain it for us? Yeah. So you just heard about biomimicry. Biomorphic urbanism is really a um uh a related idea that we can um um uh influence what we, how we design cities through natural processes. So, bio meaning life and morphic is form. So uh cities that are formed by life and what I meant by that or what we mean by that is it's actually 22 sort sort of sides of the equation of life. So it's natural processes, but also human uh interaction with those processes. So the cultural side of um how we design cities. Um So biomorphic urbanism really is about cities that are shaped by nature and cultural history. Um And I just added at the bottom there that the measure of a biomorphic um project is, does it have a net restorative benefit? So we talked a little bit about degradation of environmental systems uh earlier in the introduction. So the idea behind Biomorphic urbanism, it has a regenerative or restorative benefit, both culturally and environmentally. So this is a little bit similar to uh uh Bill mcdonough, who's a great friend of uh brainstorm design, uh His idea of cradle to grave that it's not enough to slow the rate of death of atrophy of the planet that you have to actually reverse it. And that, that's the real mandate of a designer if you're thinking about sustainability. And what, what I, what I love about your philosophy here is that um it's increasingly emerging that it's not just kind of a nice way of thinking about cities, it's a kind of existential imperative, right? I mean, that's, you know, it's nice to talk about ecosystems and cultural connection and, and all that, but it actually has a practical purpose which is to protect our cities. Uh make our cities more resilient, both culturally and ecologically manage uh sea level rise. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the work that, that uh shows that purpose. So yeah, it's not just about, you know, a, a nice idea. Um And the idea really emerged. Um We, I did a piece for National Geographic, they asked us to design a future city. Um I met the editor here actually in Hong Kong. Um And I said, if you ever wanna do an issue on cities, I'd love to contribute. So she took me up on it and she gave us about two months to come up with a design for a future city if you go to the next slide and we organized our thinking and what we do at som is we use 10 principles typically to organize our urban planning work. And they're shown here in bolded letters. Um And so for net geo, we worked at five scales. And on the next slide, you can see that we started on the right hand side of the image at the scale of the living unit, right? And then the second scale was on the left hand side of the building. So we want to show the relationship of these two scales, these two parts. And then we went to the third scale which was the um sort of this district or neighborhood scale. Um So you can start to see the integration of, of ecological elements into this drawing. Um And then the third, the sorry, the fourth scale was what we called urban hubs. And this was actually modeled on a project that we did in Kuala Lumpur. And you can see how we've allowed the water to circulate in and around the um urbanized areas. So it's a very integrated design with natural systems. So instead of, you know, Glanville and trying to force all that water out to sort of welcome it in and yeah, so that water can go up and down depending on rainfall, depending on flooding. Um It doesn't hurt the city at all. Um Now, this is again speculative here, this is not real design. Um But um and then we took it to this scale which is a regional scale and this is, you can see in the lower right we introduced with where the idea of biomorphic urbanism first was introduced. I think the regional scale is really important because it shows in purple, the uh urbanized areas yellow is agriculture. But you can also see that we talked about conservation, marine conservation, um upland conservation, micro wilderness, um ecosystem conservation. The shape of this coastline looks vaguely familiar, right? So this was a speculative, again, a speculative project. But we took this as a snapshot of a coastline just north of, of Hong Kong actually. So this is very close to where we are today. All right. So can we take you quickly into talking about this project and particularly about water? Uh because you know, as I I mentioned yesterday, one of the things that I love most about your work is that it's so conscious uh of water and the role of water in the life of, of cities. And it really uh you know, embraces this philosophy that, you know, water is your friend, not your enemy and you need to learn to work with it. And this is just a fantastic uh example of this. Um Everyone's heard of the High Line. We'll kind of look at that in a second, but this is an idea called the Water Line. What is it? Yeah. So I, I moved to Hong Kong to start our urban design studio in 2014. Um I lived here for four years um until 2018. And one of the things that always struck me about Hong Kong and the areas around here was the incredible beauty. First of all, of just this place. But the fact that you can't really get to the water very often, it's difficult to actually get to the water. You gotta go to a specific beach or a specific park. So what I proposed to our studio and we did this over about a one month period. Um I said, wouldn't it be cool if we could build a path all the way around Hong Kong Island? Because um and so that was the genesis of this. But the reason it relates to biomorphic urbanism is again thinking about scales of work. Um And so we said, OK, well, it's a trail. That's fine. That's a nice idea. Everyone likes a trail. But what is, how does it relate to Hong Kong's ecological problems for instance? Or um you know, some of the social benefits that we might get from a, from a project like this. So that's what the Hong Kong Water line is. It's a circumferential trail around the island. Um If you got that great idea, let's look at maybe some of the specific. And the other thing that struck me was thinking ecologically about this area is that there's very little protected marine environments around Hong Kong, which I think is really a tragedy if I can be a little blunt. Um There's a few but not enough for country because there are so many country parks, but they are not kind of as many, right. It's all on land, but there's this incredible asset right in front of everyone, which is the seat. Uh So the lighter blue areas was an idea about expanded marine conservation out. And so that would inform and provide a rationale for why you might want to create a trail, right? So it's a little more holistic and if you go to the next slide. Um So today, there's two main trails on Hong Kong Island, the Hong Kong trail and the Wilson trail. But they're both inland. The, the red line and the yellow line are the two trails. There's no way to get to the coast. And if you want to get to the coastal edge, you have to go to one of these green spots, these little parks, I'm, I'm sure there's many more than that. But the, the concept was that they're not connected, right. So, so I live down here in Cheko Beach, the head of this peninsula. And you can see from this map that even if you want to go up to Big Wave, the other beach, you've got to follow a paved road, there's no trail, take your life in your own hands because everyone drives really fast and the roads are narrow. But so we proposed this trail so you can see the red is the urban side of the island. I'm sure everyone knows Hong Kong pretty well here. The blue is the non urban side. Let's call it the the south side, um 10 segments, 50 kilometers. Um And the beauty of it is a lot of it is already, it's just about linking it together. So southern ridges in Singapore. Incredible project. I don't know if you haven't been there. Please go. It's really beautiful. So we, there are precedents for this. This is not something we just dreamed up one day. Uh The high line, I think everyone knows there's many others, Actually, there's one in Shenzhen as well. Um And so the team went out and we walked and mapped the whole island each segment and we uh looked in detail. This is AAA very detailed map of Hong Kong. The big, the big challenge was what I called turning the corner was going from the south, the north side to the south side around Cape Collinson, which you can see on the upper right here and then getting back around on the west end because it's uh topographically very, very challenging there. So anyway, we looked at all the segments and we should probably, yeah. Um But anyway, the coast is beautiful. And then we said, OK, there's also this issue of trash on the beaches. So can we use trash to create the component parts to build the trail? And so this series here shows how that would be done and we could then 3d print the components that would build the trail. So you see that here. And we proposed a series of simple modules. So it could be prefabricated and actually brought out to the location because we didn't, we didn't want like Tom's idea of LEGO pieces together because you don't wanna build a trail and destroy the environment that you're trying to, you know, protect to some degree. So we elevated the trail up. So the um we don't destroy habitat, habitat can just move right under the trail, capture the water filter, it, return it to the site. Um And so these just show the different applications. And then we tried to have four or five different applications where if you did have say a road and you want to put a trail next to it, there was a design for that. And so this is an illustration of um going around that Eastern and Collinson. We also as you can see in this image very clearly, it's not possible to do it actually right down at the water line. But we didn't want to do that anyway, because that's a beautiful ecosystem just by itself. So sometimes you're close to it, but generally we pulled it back, um say 100 m from the water edge. So you're still um able to access the water if you want to. And but the idea was to bring people um closer to the coastline to appreciate this incredible beauty of Hong Kong. And you know, for that instance, we were talking yesterday that maybe this could apply to other places like Macau, this isn't, you know, an idea that only has one application. It's a brilliant idea. So what, what's the, you did this pro bono? Right? What's the status of play on this? Why isn't the Hong Kong government all over the place? I don't know. I don't know. I think there's one more. Is there one more? Let's see. It's kind of a rendering. Now today we would have done this in A I in about five minutes. This is more traditional. Um I have, I was talking to a friend in Hong Kong and they were saying that it's, you now can walk quite a ways along the north coast in a interconnected trail. So I think they're just kind of building it piece by piece. But the analogy I use, I'm from Chicago, you know, 30 years ago, they decided to create a setback along the Chicago River over out of time. Um And they said, OK, we're gonna set all the buildings back 10 m 30 ft. And everyone said, why would you do that? Um And they said, well, someday it's gonna be a trail. And I don't know if anyone's been to Chicago recently, but they've finally implemented the whole river walk. So over the last 20 years, everybody has built a piece of it and all of a sudden now it's this incredible asset that and everybody can get to the water in, in the city and it's just become probably the single greatest civic uh feature in Chicago now after Millennium Park. So that's by way of saying you don't need to do it all at once. But if you work on it over 1020 30 years, you get incredible results. So Peter Gall, this is an extraordinary case study and a wonderful uh uh demonstration of how you can use design at the scale of cities which is really powerful. Thank you so much for coming to, to share your ideas and insights. Well, thank you.

Jamie Miller, Director of Biomimicry, SJ Group, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Biomimicry in Architecture and Engineering

All right. So maybe let's start with, you know, obvious straightforward questions. What's the best way to understand what biomimicry is? Biomimicry is Velcro in the 19 forties, the Swiss engineer got fed up with birds sticking to his pants and his dog's hair and took his frustration into fascination to copy that hooking mechanism to make Velcro one of the most successful adhesives of our time. It's a wind turbine blade that copies a humpback whale fin and those bumps on the leading edge called tubac and applying that with applying it to a wind turbine blade, finding that that blade is 20% more efficient runs at slower wind speeds and it's quieter. So biomimicry is recognizing that nature has been designing for 3.8 billion years and in that time has figured out some really brilliant strategies to similar problems that we face. And then how are you using that those 3.8 billion years of, of design when it comes to architecture and buildings? The process of doing biomimicry quote unquote is, is to always start with what do you want your design to do instead of jumping into what you want to design take a moment and think, what is it that you're trying to achieve? And once you understand that function, you ask the natural world. So practical examples, we designed a building in India. We wanted it to be self cooling, we wanted to capture the monsoons and hold them. So our question was, how does nature self cool? We looked at termite mounds, we looked at elephant skin. Uh We looked at prairie dog holes and we learned from those metaphors, those strategies to make really simple uh design solutions. To give you a practical example of how it applied the elephant skin has this beautiful cracking kind of um facade. We'll call it uh I'll, I'll preface this by saying to you. I dropped out of biology. I hated biology. So I'm looking at it through an engineering lens. And what we realize is that those cracks, when an elephant blows water over its body, those cracks capture the moisture. And so it allows it to evaporative cool over a longer period of time. It's like a little protective area. So we designed this rock wall facade that's hooked up to the rain harvesting system, trickles water into the rocks and has that same kind of process that evaporative cools. It pulls the water off at a slow rate to passively cool the building. I mean, it's funny you mentioned that you dropped out of biology because in that case, like then how did you get started in this field in the first place. I mean, you like, how did you become an expert in this topic before then joining up with um SJ group? It, it started 20 years ago, I was uh an engineering student um in Canada, learning, learning engineering. And, and the whole time I had this feeling like there had to be a different way of doing things. I was being trained in a certain paradigm. So I took this elective called math and poetry. It was an hour and a half of math theorems and an hour and a half of poetry. It wasn't the synergy of the two. It was just, we studied math and then we studied poems. But in the math part, our professor was brilliant and at having us almost imagine like we're coming up with the theorems ourselves. And the one that stood out and kind of shifted my whole paradigm was the Fibonacci sequence. So it's a sequence of numbers that um when you play with them, you get the golden ratio and then you get that spiral. And that's where the professor got me. He once, once we saw this spiral, he said, where have you seen this before? And in that moment, I realized that spirals in the packaging of sunflower seeds, it's in the way that pine cones curl. It's in the way that you're, when you pull the plug in your bathtub, you get that vortex that spiral was ubiquitous in nature. And in that moment, I realized that nature could teach us about design. So up until that time, I had been learning to use math and science to engineer my environment. When in that moment, I learned that nature through math and science could teach us about how to design. Let's say 11 more definitions. Question, you know another one of the topics we're working on is regenerative design. It tell me more about kind of what, what you mean by that term when it comes to the built environment, I'll, I'll start by saying nature is naturally regenerative. So what I love about biomimicry and why it's so powerful is that these terms like circularity, regenerative design, passive design. Nature has already done it and biomimicry can inspire us to look at what can nature teach us to do next. And so regenerative design to me is, is really about recognizing that humans are natural. We're a natural species, our breast feeds trees, our bodies feed the soil. Why can't our buildings feed their ecosystem? So at some point in our history and our evolution as a species, we've diverted, we've diverged and that was what I really got excited about. My phd was wondering what made us so different. And so regenerative design is just coming back, adopting new paradigms, new principles so that we create systems that go way beyond doing less harm and are truly regenerative. So what does it actually mean when you're looking at a project, whether, you know, just a building or a larger area, what does it mean to, you know, to work with the natural world as opposed to against it or ignoring it? So this is a key part of our, our paradigms that we've, we've adopted is that in when we build the first phase of any design process starts in our imagination, it starts with our assumptions, our biases, how we think informs how we design. Some of the assumptions that you can see in our built environment is that we're separate from nature. We've designed incredible concrete systems that separate us from nature. We've also built on this paradigm that we can control or predict nature. Um And these aren't necessarily wrong. But what we've realized is that the more that we've grown, the more difficult it is to predict nature, the more expensive it is to fight nature. Nature wants to come in nature abhors gradients. And if I mean, the case study is, if we all left the city today, what would naturally happen is nature would take over. So the the thing about stopping to fight nature is learning from her principles, learning how to design in a way that allows nature to come in and allows us to kind of dance with nature, but let nature lead. Um So part of the reason why I think this, we're talking about this now is obviously there's climate change, climate change is made um sustainability environmental protection, a lot more present, I think in, in the minds of developers and designers. Um obviously, we're based here in Asia. A lot of our cities are threatened by climate change, extreme weather. I remember last year the really bad floods that happened in Hong Kong, like I've never seen floods that bad in Hong Kong ever. Um in my, in my 30 years of living there. Um So, you know, what would be your, your advice to developers and designers out here when it comes to biomimicry and regenerative design, you know, what should they be looking for? How should they be thinking about this problem? How should they be thinking about design in an age of climate change and extreme weather? Yeah, great question. We, we start all of our processes with something called the living story and, and what that means is we want to learn what the land wants to do, what it will support us in doing and what it will permit us to do and it gives us this unique lens to kind of like imagine what's the trajectory of that landscape? If we were not to touch it, if we weren't to do anything, what does Nature want to do and then to start to start to make design decisions based on that. So if nature wants to flood, the old paradigm or the engineering based resilience is try to fight that flood, but how big are berms going to be how much energy are we going to put into fighting it? There's a great project in Toronto where I'm from, where they designed in a wetland and designed all their buildings to flood. So it's a shift in the paradigm again where we're using ecological resilience and eco ecosystems don't fight environmental pressures. They kind of learn and adapt at, at, at multiple scales. So integrating new technology, digital um uh technology to learn what nature is doing to be more nuanced and then make adaptations in real time. Another example is like you think of your skin, my skin is responding differently here than it is here. So having that more locally attuned responsive design is a, is a key part of, of managing climate change, reintegrating uh natural phenomenon into our designs and doing it in a way that, you know, doesn't make us too uncomfortable and it's good. You mentioned the tech is like this isn't an anti tech thing at all. I mean, there's a lot of research that goes into new materials, new design processes, like what role are, you know, new technologies? And yes, here's the A I question, you know, what role is A I also playing in making these ideas more feasible. This is the brilliant thing about biomimicry is that it's a bridge, it's a bridge in so many ways. I work a lot with indigenous communities because it's providing me a bridge with some of their principles and thinking. But it's a bridge also uh in terms of historic technologies and future technologies. And what I mean by that is, you know, how do you harness when you do biomimicry, you come up with some pretty bold kind of metaphors. Like, what if this building could breathe like a lung or what if the skin of the building could breathe like skin when you have that metaphor? It's like, well, OK, how do you make that come to life? How do you do that? And that's when you start to look at the plethora of technologies that are available and see and you cherry pick the ones that help that metaphor come to life and, and become real. Um I do want to ask about, about your role, you know, you are the director of Biomimicry for SJ group, a big multinational construction and architecture firm. Why do you think a big firm like SJ group is investing time to make a director of biomimicry position? Um So in my journey, uh II I had a company and, and one of the, the, the companies within Sur Beard was my client and we built this relationship over time and really built out that biomimicry practice. But I think what SJ A did was they got on to that realization that like I said earlier, regenerative design, passive design circularity, all of those things already exist in nature. So, biomimicry is kind of this catch all and it's a way of looking at design and, and in a way, yeah, it's a way of looking at design that's like perpetually trying to copy and mimic nature. So I think they just saw a little bit ahead of their time because nature is also going to teach us what to do next. But the cool thing is is that um although I'm, I'm the first director, we are shortly followed by Microsoft who, how also has a director of biomimicry in the latest uh regenerative design report by Arup. It was co-written by a biomimicry expert. Uh We're seeing Perkins and will purchase a company that is very biomimetic. Um Jacobs Engineering has hired a bunch of biomimicry professionals. So the cool thing is is that we're seeing this uprising and this acknowledgement that nature is the only model of sustainability we have on this planet. We're a very young species. And so when you use biomimicry, you kind of put ourselves in our place and we can see that it can lead us for a long time. Um You know, I I I've seen some of the, some of the designs that you're putting out there that your team is putting out there. I think I saw the, was it the Hiway idea? It's like these Hexagons that are surrounding a bridge and it's a cool looking idea. One wonders if you talk to the construction, the guys, they'll be like, oh, sorry, boss like this. This is not, I mean, it's a cool idea but it's not going to work. I mean, how, I mean, do you ever have to feel like you have to compromise between, you know, there's this cool idea based off of natural ideas and then you try to work on it with the materials and the process that we have and it's not possible, like, do you ever have to compromise between those two things? Yeah. I mean, I guess there is compromise. The point of biomimicry is to push the paradigm. So you're going to come up with bold ideas. But the point of that is to develop, it's a development of believable ideas that might not yet be possible but, but provoke a conversation, what could be possible. But really, we don't try to compromise because I, I've seen in my time that the only limitation to, to the application of biomimicry is creativity, it's the creativity and how you abstract metaphors from nature, but also the creativity and how you can exploit or harness or use existing technologies to put, put that bold idea to life. And so, um no, I always think there's a solution. It's just a matter of finding it. And are there like smaller things that can be done with, with building projects? So not maybe like a a radical change but small tweaks that can be made to really kind of, you know, to make our buildings more efficient, better cooling, whatever you want them to do Yeah, there's, there's thousands of biomimicry technologies out there. I've been tracking them for 20 years. Um, you know, cool windows that copy, um, uh, spider silk that reduces bird collisions by 70%. You know, there's, um, uh, IOT technology that kind of matches all of your electrical systems and helps them communicate similar to bee, uh, bee hives and how bees communicate. So there's technologies you can use. Um, but, you know, if you want your, your building to circulate better, look at, you know, natural models, it's, it's there are so many ways you can apply biomimicry to an existing uh building or project. Um So I know you've had to work with kind of many, many designers over the world, kind of telling them how biomimicry works. But you know what's kind of the one piece of advice or the one way of thinking about this issue that you'd give to an up and coming designer that wants to start looking into the space, applying some of these natural techniques in the design work they're doing. So there's two things I'll say. First of all, biomimicry is very simple. Um Maybe I'll start with this. It's just, it's essentially a lens that when you adopt this lens, your whole world will change. So I'm going to invite you to just close your eyes for a second or just imagine a forest in your brain. That forest has ancient elders that have long lasted climate change. Towers that are moving fluids up hundreds of feet without electricity, collecting solar energy. With these materials that use a subset of periodic table of elements. Water based chemistry, these leaves are built in benign manufacturing. They fall into a circular economy. Those trees are communicating with each other through underground networks and tunnels through their mycelium. When you start to see that nature is doing chemistry, engineering design, you start to realize that there's a whole world out there. And to practically do biomimicry, there's two things I'll say one is to go back to that function. Whenever you have a design challenge, just ask, how would nature do that function? And then the second part is I like to break biomimicry up into form based biomimicry, which is copying shapes in nature to achieve a function process based biomimicry is manufacturing or behaving that's like the termite mound example. Um And then systems based biomimicry, which is where I love to play. And that's when you start to learn the subtleties of, of nature. And you start to learn the brushstrokes. It's like imagining the natural world this beautiful piece of art. And we've been asked to add to it. And over hundreds of years, we've been scribbling on that piece of art. But if we learn those brushstrokes, we can add to it, we can learn the nuances of the artist and build to the beauty. All right. So with that contemplated image, um I'd like to kind of. Thank you so much, Jamie for kind of introducing us this idea and all the cool techniques, materials technologies that are coming out from looking at the natural world. So everyone, please. Thank Jamie. Thank you very much.

Renée Cummings, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Data Science, University of Virginia

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design In Focus - Designing For Equity, Access & Justice

Thank you so very much. Let me say it's an absolute honor and a pleasure to be with you. I'm a criminologist and criminal psychologist. I'm also a therapeutic jurisprudence specialist and I'm also a terrorism specialist and that is the work that I bring to data science. When we think about equity, when we think about access and when we think about justice, we have got to think about designing with these concepts, using these concepts as frameworks to audit this technology. We know that A I is a revolutionary technology. We know that A I is a radical technology, but we have to understand that there is no A I without data, data is the most critical component. It is the most critical component, the lifeblood of this technology. So when we think about data, we have got to think about the frameworks which we use to really ensure sure that we are developing and designing and deploying a technology that is equitable, a technology that is just and a technology that creates access. We know that data creates very, very unique challenges when it comes to bias, when it comes to discrimination, when it comes to systemic challenges. We also know that data if left in a space and a state of really not being managed could really create some extraordinary challenges. So when we think about data, I like to say, we have got to bring an ethical approach to the ways in which we're doing data. We have got to think about how do we use equity and access and justice so that we do not undermine data accuracy or we do not undermine data integrity, data fidelity or even our data validity. These are very, very critical questions. So when we think about access, we have got to think about visibility, we have got to think about voice. We have got to think about vulnerable groups and the ways in which we can ensure we are building a just future. We are co creating a just future for everyone to be a part of it. When we think about justice, we have got to think about questions around due process. One of the things that we have seen with data and with algorithms is that an algorithm has the ability to undermine in real time questions around agency questions around access questions around self actualization. An algorithm has the ability to make a decision about you without you even knowing a decision was made. So for us to really bring an approach that is equitable approach that creates access, an approach that is justice oriented. We have always got to think about bringing a very sophisticated level of due diligence to the ways in which we are designing because it is about trust, it is about responsibility and it is about ensuring that this technology benefits humanity. We also have to think about questions around due process, questions around uh just the ways in which we need to bring a requisite level of duty of care, the ways in which we need to bring the duty to warn and the ways in which we need to bring ethical vigilance to what we're doing. So let me just start with questions around duty of care. We know that A I has extraordinary promise. We know that A I is not only pervasive, but we know that A I has the potential to just do extraordinary things. But we know this technology also brings extraordinary risk where there are risks. It means that there are responsibilities and those responsibilities require us to protect the rights of the individuals who are engaging with this technology, the rights of entire societies. We have got to ensure that the technology is not only responsible and trustworthy, but we're understanding questions around resources, data and A I require an extraordinary amount of resources. Uh The impact on the environment is something that many of us do not think about. We speak about building a sustainable and resilient future using this technology, but we've got to think about the ways in which the environment is also being impacted by this technology. So we have a duty of care, a responsibility as a data scientist, as a critical data scientist, as individuals who are designing technology, we have a responsibility to ensure that we bring a framework to audit the ways in which we are building models, the ways in which we are building algorithms. We have got to ensure that we are not only bringing this very sophisticated and heightened level of diligence. We have got to ensure that we are understanding that responsibility, our duty of care. We have got to ensure we have got to ensure that everything that we do with this technology understands this question of due process, equity and fairness coming together to create situations of justice. When I speak about data, I always speak about this data pipeline. And some of the things that I like to look at would be questions around the provenance of data. It's so important when we're designing to ask ourselves, where did this data come from? I always speak of the anatomy of data, the genealogy of data, the pathology of data, sometimes we're using data that is being duplicated in very weird ways. Data that's actually missing pieces, critical pieces to the stories that need to be told. So when we are using data, when we are bringing this heightened level of due diligence, when we are paying attention to this duty of care, it means as designers using data, as designers building algorithms, as designers of a I the space in which I work, we have always got to ensure that everything that we do, we bring this heightened level of ethical vigilance. So when we think about access, we have got to ask ourselves when we are designing, when we're developing and when we are building, who are we building for? Are we using this technology to create access or are we using this technology in ways that are going to deny access ways that are going to deny access to resources that are going to deny opportunities? We've got to think about that. When we think about equity, we have got to understand that data equity is business intelligence, data equity is economic intelligence. Data equity is also about opportunity, but it's also about empowering. When we think about justice, we know if we are designing, developing procuring a technology that is unjust a technology that is unfair, then we are not designing for the greater good. We've got to think about those questions. We've also got to think about the ways in which we engage communities that is so important to the work that we're doing stakeholder engagement, whether or not the products, the policies, the processes we are designing? Are they being community inspired? Are they being community led? What's the level of stakeholder engagement? How involved are communities in the process? It's very, very critical the ways in which we engage communities to design because we are realizing that many of our data sets, many of the algorithms that we're deploying are creating very, very critical risks. So aspect of what we do is that ability to mitigate those risks to, to manage those risks, to monitor those risks. So if we use equity and access and justice as frameworks to audit, if when we're designing and developing and deploying and procuring, we are thinking about those vulnerability audits and those impact assessments and those risk management approaches and those crisis management approaches and the ways in which we are building our business continuity plans. If we are thinking about them within that framework of equity access and justice, it means we are designing for good. It means that we are designing and engaging and educating in the kinds of structures or systems that we are creating. We also have got to think about for me the legacy. And I always say what I have learned as a critical data scientist, what I have learned as someone involved in A I and data governance is the question of legacy that is attached to data. When we think about data, when we think about algorithms, we have got to think about the legacies that we are deploying with an algorithm. As I said earlier, an algorithm has the ability to make a decision about you not only in real time, but without you even knowing a decision has been made. So when you think of your own identity, when you think about the ways in which you want to engage with this technology. You have got to think about the legacy when you are designing, I design with data, when you are designing, what is the legacy you want this algorithm to leave? And it's a very, very critical question because an algorithm has the ability to create access or deny access, to create resources and deny resources and to define legacy and undermine legacies. And it's something that we have got to think about. We've also got to think about the imagination and how the imagination intersects with equity and access and justice. We've got to think about a radical imagination. And I think from the few days that I have spent in Macau, I have really experienced the possibilities and the potential of a radical imagination because what I have seen among the fusion of cultures is an enduring spirit and this grand idea of possibilities and imagining the impossible and then designing it. So as we think about designing, using a framework of equity, access and justice, we have got to ask ourselves, what is our relationship with our communities? What is our relationship with society? What is our responsibility as data scientists, as technologists, as designers, as policymakers leaders? What is our responsibility as we co create a future together? How are we going to ensure that we are building equity and access and justice into our designs? How are we going to ensure that we are bringing that ethical vigilance that is required. Because what have realized with data, what we have realized with A I is that A I is not a technical tool A I is a socio technical tool because of the extraordinary impact it has on society and continues to have the other challenge with A I and gen A I is that we are yet to truly understand the extent of this technology and what this technology can do, we know that it can do great things. And we are seeing that in healthcare, we are seeing that in communication. We are seeing just about every discipline and every industry reimagining business model using A I and using gen A I. So we understand the extraordinary potential, but we've also got to understand the extraordinary risks. We've got to understand the responsibilities. We've got to understand our rights. We've also got to understand that data is now a question of justice algorithms are now a question of justice. When we are designing, we've got to think about human rights and civil rights and data rights and algorithmic rights. These are big questions. What data has allowed us to do is answer some of the world's greatest questions around the environment, around health care, around criminal justice. But what data has also done is create new ethical challenges. So if we want to think about technology in a responsible way, if we want to think about technology in a way that benefits humanity, if we want to think about technology for good A I for good and, and doing good data science, we have got to think about a framework that is built on equity access and justice. Because if we do not, then what we are going to create would be systems that not only undermine our own progress but systems that could create situations that undermine the ways in which we move into the future together. So as you build, as you design, as you develop, as you deploy, as you procure, I ask you when you are auditing, when you are doing those vulnerability audits and those impact assessments, you have got to bring that question of equity access and justice because if we do not do it, then we are at risk of creating a future that may not even welcome us into that space. So as we dream and as, as we imagine, let us think of the impossible and let us use that framework to really deploy what is possible for all of us. And with that, I thank you.

Olof Schybergson, Chief Design and Product Officer, Accenture Song  ; Founder, Fjord In conversation with Wang Fang, Fortune China

Brainstorm Design 2024: ‘Social Rewilding’

So Olaf at Accenture Song, you published this annual Life Trend report for 17 years. That's right. 17 years. Yeah. So when I read your 2025 report, my feeling is uh this report eloquently articulates a lot of like various concerns that we had sensed for a long time but have struggled to, to uh to express. So it's nicely put. Um So just tell us a little bit more about the report. Why do you do this? How do you do do this and your feedback uh you get so the the background to it is essentially a design trends report. So that's how it started 17 years ago. And you know, work now, pretty much every client project is sort of a fusion of business needs technology and then humans. So really the trend report sits in the intersection of those and what the song, the sort of uniquely brings that other parts of accenture doesn't necessarily bring is that focus on the human. So, so, so, so that's kind of where it comes from what it focuses on and it, it, it's meant they meant to sort of inspire and inform our clients, but also challenge our teams in their projects and so on to take it into. Right? So it's very interesting. Yesterday, you gave a speech that speech was more about how enabling technology can become, for example, it makes space more sensible, more responsible. But uh today we're going to delve into the report, uh which sort of you spotted five trends for the next year and collectively, they sort of paint a darker side of technology. Uh They look at the sort of often very stressful relationship. Um It has become between human beings and technology. So uh let's have a look uh into the report and perhaps talk about the themes one by one. So I'm really struck by this. Um This is the first uh trend he spotted um which is called the cost of hesitation. It's about the loss of trust um that we have, I mean with, I mean, in any digital interactions um and brands have lost authenticity um with all the message they sent out sometimes becomes confusing. So, um how do business regain that authenticity and regain people's trust? Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting that you interpret the trends as kind of dark because for me, they expose some of the tensions, the tensions between an increasingly digitally mediated life of people and some of the opportunities but also challenges within it. So this one in particular cost of hesitations, that's, that's very much about the evolution of digital media and, and the reaction that people are having when they don't necessarily know whether they can trust the content, the brand, the communication, the promotion and so on. So it sort of gives rise to this sort of question mark which leads to hesitation and there's a real, um and there's a real sort of underlying pattern that's been going for a while of what some people might call the shit education of the internet. And, and slop is another kind of term that started to be used for essentially either untrustworthy or poor content. And people feel like there's a lot of stuff coming at them in digital because people want to monetize digital. So there's just a lot of information, a lot of promotion, a lot of marketing coming at them. So that's, that's already, you know, demanding and then over 50% of people, the majority of people in the last year according to the research that we've done have experienced both content that's kind of false or fake and been subject to some sort of fraud. So people are personally starting to question, you know, is this real? And is it not? So then there's a cost for them both a sort of cognitive load of trying to figure out, is it real? Is it trustworthy? Can I go for this ami going to fall victim to something? But also they might be missing out because they hesitate. And this has happened to me and my co author of the report as well. His daughter sent him a link to this New Oasis concert and he didn't trust the link. So he didn't click and they didn't get tickets. So there might be a cost for the individual, but there's also a cost for businesses. So if you don't trust whether this website is actually real, is this product description and this product review, are they real and so on, you might not follow through with the purchase. So that's becoming a real business problem. One of one big consumer electronics manufacturer that we're working with discovered just recently that the drop off in purchases was was very much to do with people asking, am I actually on the real.com site or am I somewhere else? Yeah, so A I can enable business to know their customers better, that's for sure. But A I technology can also create a barrier between companies and their customers because it just makes um less, I mean necessary for uh companies to have human to human real interactions. Uh One example is um Starbucks in China, they're having problems. They got so caught up in trying to match their local competitors in enabling uh the customer to order digitally. So they piss off some of their loyal uh customers uh who are really interested and curious about their third uh space um idea. So another example I want to use is um you know, in China, this live stream ecommerce becomes really popular so you have like people can uh on screen, they can see hosts selling their stuff. Um But some companies are using a I generated host these days. So um as a customer, you can just look at the screen thinking, OK, this person is talking to me selling this stuff and even answer my questions. But once you find out they are actually fake ones, it can be really off putting. So um so technologies can be, can create this barrier. So how is accenture Song helping business to sort of prevent this from happening? Um So specific to sort of gen gen A I, you know, is this incredible tool that allows us to do all sorts of things that we couldn't do a few years ago, but it can be, it can be used of course for good, but also for bad. So those who want to spam people, those who want to defraud people and so on, they readily can, can, can use gen A I. Um And, and, and that is leading to the sort of pollution in a way of the content and, and, and therefore cost of hesitation, that sort of phenomenon. Um And, and from our perspective, we have a big focus and have had for years on responsible A I and, and that's about ethics. It's about reliability, it's about building trust, et cetera. So, so, so it's core to how we think about A I and gen A I but then there's also very much of the human and design consideration there. So you can use H AN A I to simplify, make it more seamless, identify the human. So it feels natural to me, I can follow it through. I trust it and so on. But it can also get in the way it can get in the way if it's implemented poorly. And then I'm like, am I actually speaking to a real person? Do I really trust the information that's provided here and so on? So it's a nuanced answer. It's not, it's not an easy, yes or no, good or bad, easy or hard. You think as technology gets better, it will become even more difficult for us to deserve. I mean, discern which will and what I mean, fake, that's probably, I mean, make things a little bit easier for companies. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And you know, the sort of agent space is also evolving quite quickly that we've seen sort of actually just recently a move away from the humanized digital agents because there's been a little bit of a reaction against it that, you know, these sort of fake humans that aren't real humans. So I think that the space is evolving really, really fast as well. Let's have a look at the next trend which is really self promoting. I mean, as a parent of a young boy, I'm in this trap at the moment. So tell us a bit more about this. So we're fearful about all the interactions our Children have online. Yeah. So, so um it was talked about in some of the men, at least by some of the previous speakers, the challenges around mental health, the challenges around a feeling of anxiety. There's an interesting book that came out this year called The Anxious Generation Talking About young people and the effects of in particular social media on them and, and harmful content, but also overuse of digital, etc, it's a real thing. And I don't, you know, I have, I have two teenage kids and I don't know any other parent of similar age kids who don't struggle with, with that sort of interplay. So it, it's, it's a tough trap for parents. How do you give safety? How do you get social connection? How do you get give uh learning and education and so on to your kids um without exposing to the, exposing them to the sort of harmful nature of social media and digital. So, so it is a tough trap for parents. But uh it's also a trap because um adults, their lives are also mediated through social media and digital and so on. And you want the role model for your kids. So it's not easy to just say no and then you kind of behave badly yourself. It's also a tricky balance. Yes, we have to behave ourselves as well, right? So the third theme is in patients economy this is interesting. Basically, customers are not waiting for companies to feed them information, they reach out and they sometimes seek quick solutions. So this is about how business businesses should supply their customers with quicker solutions. But without compromising on quality. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right and in it affects lots, lots of different aspects of life. So for example, in health care, self diagnosis, you know, with the help of you might watch youtube videos. So you might learn in other ways through digital and you listen to, to influencers etc. So it might be diagnosis, it might be and things like money matters, et cetera. So people might not wait for their hospital appointment or doctor's appointment, they might not want to go and talk to the bank manager or speak to them or whatever, but they look for other shortcuts essentially to accomplish the things that they want to do in their lives. Well, I want to go through this quickly because I want to really focus on the fifth trend, which is social rewilding. This is an interesting concept really interesting to me and appealing to me. So could you just define this concept to us? What is social rewilding about? Yeah. And the trend, I mean, the force is behind this trend. Yeah, I'm glad you want to focus on it because it's actually my favorite of the five trends as well. So I find it absolutely fascinating and rewilding as a word has usually been used for rewilding, for example, manufacturer like farms and so on, back into the natural habitat and so on. So this trend is all about humans kind of rewilding. So reconnecting with the real world looking for more textured social interactions, emotional experiences and so on. And you could say it's an, it's a counter trend to what happened through COVID. It's also a counter trend to this sort of what felt even recently as, as, as a sort of unstoppable uh increase of digital in, in our lives. Um So it's super interesting, you see things like people falling out of love with, with um digital dating solutions and instead um you know, going back to old school forms of dating and unplug. That's right. Yeah. Unplug. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and meet people in real life. So things like in China, for example, um uh city walking tours are a big thing, running clubs are a big thing all over the world. So people um have, have these sort of in person ways of social and so on and the natural world plays a huge role. So when you ask people, what was the best experience in the last week or month, the majority talk about a real world experience. And it's multiple times that of people mentioning digital experiences, right? So specifically how would you help businesses to create such textures uh uh interaction uh regain the human to human kind of feeling. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's now about kind of we're at the stage where we're starting to sort of civilize some of these technologies where it's not an either or, and people don't get locked just into a virtual world, but to use the digital experience to augment and amplify uh real world interactions and so on. But you also see, see people themselves kind of reorganizing around it and, and um you know, kids, kids are choosing to put their phones away, kids are choosing to do other things and, and you, you look at young kids and what are they into? There's actually a nostalgia for the pre digital age in the digital generation. So people kind of fall in love with these music videos from the nineties, the music of the nineties and the games and yeah, and this sort of like the nostalgic for like they look, they look like they're really in the moment and they look so unaffected and so on and so forth. You know, I discovered my kid has LPS vinyls at home. It's like what's going on. So this is an amazing uh report. I really encourage everybody to uh have a look on accenture songs website. It's really thought promoting and um thank you so much and uh for sharing with us. Um Basically, it just tells us, I mean, how designers these days are challenged when everybody wants to unplug to how to design digital experiences that coexist with our desire for real human to human interaction. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Tom Dixon, Founder and Creative Director, Tom Dixon, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Fat Chance

We often talk about designers and say that they are rock stars, but you're a real rock star. Disco. Disco. Ok. All right. Fantastic. Say a little bit if you can just very quickly about your unique path to becoming a designer. Um accidental really. You know, I had no idea what design was, but I just um had a motorbike accident stopped my music career. Um The bass player that replaced me is now in Pink Floyd play for Madonna played for Michael Jackson. So that could have been me. That could have been you. So, yeah. Um you, you're clicking my um uh oh, sorry, let me do. There we go. Um So, well, let's jump in, shall we to some of your current uh designs and what you're, what you're working on? Are we at the right place here? I'm gonna give you the clicker and let you kind of organize this. How about that? Well, I think I was asked to talk about um seating really. And so this is just to show, I guess we're crashing back down to the ground after having talked about artificial intelligence, United Nation Goals, you know, and big development projects and back to kind of the domestic scale chairs are great because for designers, although somebody did say earlier, we don't need any more chairs. They, they're a great typology for Eddie designer because they're human size, right? Um So I um um designed this series of chairs called fat. Um and they're called fat for an obvious reason. They've got these inflated comfort parts. Um because I, I am, I really don't sit still, which is what this kind of um is talking about. I like to fit poorly. You'll see, you know, during the talk. Uh What I noticed with these chairs is that you could actually make them into love seats and that kind of suited conversation better than just sitting side by side. So I thought I'd make a sofa which took into account a bit the modern age. Um Nice to see Kim Kardashian endorsing the fatness of the chair and her advertising her Spanx lines. And I think the name fat is, is, is really a celebration of more voluptuousness and more, you know, more comfort and more generosity, which is what upholstery needs. So these chairs are incredibly simple, there's nothing to them at all. And sometimes, you know, in design, you want to do less rather than more all they're doing is inflating those comfort parts. Um So, like I said, celebration of fatness and I think what I noticed really was more to do with how people are living and I wanted to do a couch or a sofa as we call it in England. And this is how people traditionally have sat on, on, on sofas, which is all in a line focusing on one, you know, focal point, which would have been the fireplace, then the radiogram and then the television screen. Right. And that's what people have done for hundreds of years. Right. Um, but of course, we don't live like that anymore. We live like this. So we're not all looking at the same thing anymore. And you don't need to have your sofa rammed against the wall, all looking at one thing in line because you're not looking at one thing anymore. One person's on deliveroo ordering their takeaway meal that they're going to eat on the sofa, the other person is doing their homework and somebody else is on Instagram, right? Um So this is really a story about how, you know how even your domestic objects change according to society. And I think designers can always work a bit better when um when things change. And so this is just an observation of mine that it's better to have a sofa that points in all directions really. So it needs to be kind of simple. And um so the idea was just taking those that extreme fatness and making it into the simplest possible modules uh child's play if you like and, and trying to find a way of, of, of uh being able to put them back to front and side by side and really bringing themselves to the middle of the room as a three dimensional object. So that's the result really, which is that um you're, you're doing like with the kitchen that used to be round against the wall, then the kitchen island became the thing where everybody collects and, and that means that you can really use the sofa in the same way, you just put it in the middle of the room and, and you're all facing different directions we're still communing. So I think people still want to be together. It's great. Just looking at those, uh makes me feel a lot more relaxed, kind of wish we had one on stage, we can sit any way we want it. There you go. All right. Well, those are marvelous and they're really uh kind of signature like your other great uh uh design lines. They have a kind of clarity of vision to them, a kind of simplicity to them. Uh They just make sense. Um And I I, and they, and they look terrific, really uh fabulous. So let's talk about people who try to imitate this, this signature approach and vision that you bring to all of your different projects because I know this is something that has kind of irritated you for many, many years, describe the problem for us. Well, maybe I'll just talk about a specific lamp and OK, this journey really and, and this is what these slides are about. You know, I was on a not for profit trip organized by the British Council to Jaipur in India where they wanted to find new um uh new typologies for the really skilled craftsmen of Jaipur that are gradually losing their skills, particularly the ones making these amazing water pots that are used in all of the villages in in in India to carry water because all of these water pots are being replaced by much cheaper plastic equivalent. And so that kind of heritage is changing. And here again, in terms of under designing rather than over designing, here is just the idea of kind of turning the thing upside down and making a light out of it. So the shapes are roughly the same, you know, that that thing of the hand beating that you see here is kind of celebrated and, and some of the curves and just incorporated into a lighting object which gave, you know, maybe 20 people now moved to a metal work city called Mora about, you know, a chance to make things that people were consuming again, right? So these have been very successful for us and, and we really our first hit when we started the label maybe 20 years ago. But you know, as you go to buy them, this is what you get on ebay and various other sites is vast amounts of not Tom Dick and Beat lights. Right. So, so this is a typical page online showing hundreds of copies and we've done an audit online and we're talking really about 800,000 units available now, a quarter of the price of the lamps that we can sell. So it becomes a bit of a problem. Um You know, some people say you should be flattered, you know, and of course, I am immensely and, you know, I borrowed the shapes from elsewhere anyway. So, you know, who am I to complain? So, but what do you do about that as a designer? Well, not a lot because, you know, effectively legal system. This is an Australian website. If you put replica Tom Dixon before the name, you're allowed to sell it in Australia as long as they explicitly say, yeah, this is a fake. So they can, they're calling out the fake and authorizing, authorizing the sale of it in Australia. I can't do anything about that. Um And, and, you know, the aesthetic is actually very kind of replicable and even IKEA, you know, do a bowl which is strangely reminiscent of the lamp, right? But what was kind of nice was the next step, which is the hacker community gets online and says, well, if you want a Tom Dixon lamp for $18 not $100 buy a bowl of IKEA drill a hole in it and hang it upside down and this is the result not bad. So, you know, I love you. I love the way the thing is borrowed and then re borrows again and, you know, there's ways of getting the look at much lower price. So I just thought, well, what is it that I can do against the copies where I can't do anything about the intellectual property? I can get people if they use our photographs. Actually, photography is more protected than, than shape in, in, in legal systems around the world. But what I really want to do is copy the copier. So my plan now, which we've just launched is to do Unbeaten. Do you get the joke? The Unbeaten writing that I take out the beating, I make it completely smooth instead of hiding the aluminum because I make mine out of brass. The CPI has to make that out of aluminum. Um I, I would celebrate the aluminum and, and I can now make these at half the price of my original. And I've got a completely new aesthetic, which is a more industrial shiny aesthetic, which I think rejuvenates lamp all together. So in the end, you know, in a position where copied the copyist better in my view and reduced my pricing by 50% which I think is about right. They're still beautiful though. I mean, is this, is this working, is this deterring? Well, it's only just launched. I'll tell you, I'll tell you next year. These things take a while to bid in. Lovely. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I, I think that there's there a kind of coping strategy if you like, um which uh has suited uh you know, my impatience anyway. And then giving me a brand new aesthetic. It's great. Yeah, those are really nice. Um And so these, these, these are not out yet, they'll come out. No, no, they're just out, just out. Yeah. So good reason not to buy uh the copies, I think. Yeah. So let's tackle this, this third topic that we were going. So I think, you know, so I, I talked obviously about design being influenced by changes in society but even better is when there's changes in technology. And what's been amazing, you know, over the last few years for any lighting designer, because that's the majority of what we do is is the revolution moving electrical lighting, incandescence to electronic lighting which led and led s have been amazing from a sustainability point of view because of the reduction in in power usage and the heat loss, you know, and you know, the other thing which I love about, you know, the modern world, which is hidden is the circuit board, which is the most beautiful piece of design which goes completely hidden in any mobile phone, in any car. You have a circuit in the refrigerator now, but they're largely just masks from view. So this is just a project about trying to celebrate the Led and trying to think of a new way of illuminating. It's kind of interesting even here where you, you've got the conventional lighting up here. Neoclassical, you've got the spotlights all running on LEDs and then you've got the screens which are completely separate, which are all running on LEDs. We've got a lot of light in here, but I wanted to kind of celebrate the raw elements of electronic lighting. And so this was an idea to try and just use the circuit board without covering it at all. So the circuit board becomes a unit, a module like a building block uncovered on masks and just raw with its LEDs on top. And with this, in fact, with two of them, a square one and a round one, just like with Morse code, you can kind of build a whole language of lighting. So using what's normally a track system, um so you can just plug the things in, you're in a position ready to deconstruct how you illuminate the space and think completely differently about, you know, how you like things and instead of having what we're seeing here, which is light sources everywhere, you're kind of able to build as an architect or, or a designer something using my kit. So I'm no longer the designer, I'm the producer of a of a building kit if you like for other people to make their own lighting solutions, right? It's kind of just uh you know, elegant simplicity. Again, it's sort of dots and dashes, right? Yeah. So it is like, you know, like I say, sort of the simplistic kids building, building a LEGO kit effectively. Um where, where really you can just completely change the ways that you illuminate. So this, this column, for instance, uses something like 8000 LEDs. So if you turn up, I mean, it's like having a sun inside your, inside your room and it kind of blasts out a huge amount of light, you can turn write down and make it almost like a sunset as well. So there's, there's um and then, you know, obviously with the other, the other ways you can just like use them the skirting board or you can use them as a screen or even make a sun on the wall like you've got in the Sentinel, what's this called? Um It's called code code. Ok. Get it. I get it. So I think, you know, the, the net result is really to try and say, well, you know, wouldn't it be nice to actually, you know, because the designers are always trying to make the perfect item, the finished item that you never touch again, the icon. But I kind of further the idea now of just providing, you know, more possibilities than I could think of myself, you know, and that's something I'm pursuing also in furniture with like, for instance, this project, which is just about using one extrusion of, of, of brass and, and and giving and this, this is my studio, everybody making a piece of furniture just out of this one very recognizable unit of, of, of brass tubing, right. So I think I'll evolve from being a design of objects to, to try and be a bit more a designer of systems. Yeah, we've only got 25 seconds to go. It's, it's just amazing. Um You know, how do you, how do you get inspiration for these kind of things? Do you have a kind of standard process for coming up? No, I think we always the um the each piece has a different narrative and a different story, but the obsessions remain the same. It's always about, you know, because I started off uh welding and then became a designer. I like how you make things, you know, the craft techniques or the, or the factory techniques or increasing the new digital techniques. And I love the material, you know, just converting something raw into something of value is something which, which I've always thought was like alchemy. You know, it's like you're transforming, you know, a piece of rubbish into gold, which is how I started with scrap metal. Right. Right. Well, it's one of the things that I think makes your work so, so unique and, and relevant is that, you know, as we're doing more and more things on screens and with led s your work is very tangible. It's very uh you know, concrete and and, and edgy. Um So, thanks very much, Tom. We appreciate you showing us your latest inspiration and we hope you'll come back. Thank you very much.

Tina Norden, Partner & Principal, Conran & Partners, In conversation with Wang Fang, Fortune China

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design For Transformative Spaces

Tina. It's really good to have you back with us on the stage. It's great to be here. But as um Tony just said, uh your career spends uh stretches across different continents, different sectors in hospitality, you've worked on projects, hotels, restaurants, residential places, uh sometimes in really far flung locations, Hong Kong, Mumbai and London, of course. So you must have dealt with, where am I challenge all the time? You don't want guests to feel like, OK, this is the room, wake up and feel like, OK, this is the room I feel like exactly like the the room I stayed a week ago. So uh when I when whenever you are faced with a project, how do you do to give the design language to let it um tell a unique story about that particular location. What's the research process like, what is the million dollar? Really? But um we always start with looking at location, very importantly, um sense of places in our trademarks. So we can't really use that anymore. But um we look at the historic context, we look at the architecture, we look at, you know, everything kind of surrounding our project really looking for clues, you know, looking for interesting little stories, looking for interesting different elements that we can use to inform our design. But actually the most important and most fundamental part of the people that are going to be used it and, and with that, it's not just the people that are going to be staying in a hotel, but it's also people working there, the people that form the entire cosmos of the project and it's really trying to find a way of designing for them and being specific. You know, we firmly believe if you try and design for everyone, you design for no one, actually, the more specific you can be design, the more you actually create something that is unique and something that, that will appeal, right? Does it involve a lot of like talking with local people, staff members? Absolutely. I mean, you know, I think it's, I think the connection into the team that we're working with in every location and there is always a team that we're working with, you know, what we do is not done in, in isolation. Um And whether that is um team members that are from a place we read international office even though we're quite small. Um or whether it's actually speaking to the people that we're working with on the ground is to understand the culture, spending time as well, you know, spending some time eating, you know, go out seeing the streets and and really kind of getting under the skin of a place from uh from your website and from uh the, the speech you gave us yesterday, I can see a lot of your projects. They, they're really good at blending heritage and modernity. So what is the trick of doing this, what, how to strike the balance between the two? I mean, working with historic buildings and historic cities? I mean, that's what we're all in, you know, every city has this amazing history. Um For me, it's about preserving the old and highlighting it, you know, bringing it back to what it was, but everything that's new has to kind of feel like it's new. I think there's nothing worse than trying to recreate the past. It's about layering and cities are always about layering, it's about bringing new and all together and creating something that then works for the future, right? We will have a look of your amazing project in a minute. But before that, I want to ask this question because the theme of this year's uh event is experimental experiences. So um how are clients in the hospitality industry? Uh thinking about immersive experiences? Are you using new technology like a VR even gaming uh gadgets or you depend more on, I mean, classic storytelling techniques. Well, in a, in a funny kind of way, I think architecture certainly interior design is probably more analog than other design disciplines just by the very nature of we deal with things that you feel, touch, sit on, you know, and with fabrics, whatever it might be. So, you know, that that is most important from our point of view. But what's really interesting is that a lot of the stuff that we almost intuitively did are now backed by science? And I think that's, that's very exciting. We heard a lot of that today, of course, you know, that, that actually there's now explanations why a certain color might work or there's explanations why certain things trigger the brain in a in, in a way. But ultimately, I think quite often for us, it comes back to a kind of gut feeling about the experience of working with people and trying to create spaces that we want people to feel good in. Um And maybe that's not always so digital, maybe that's actually kind of more analog and overlaid, more digital elements. Great. So um post panem, not only have we found people are doing hybrid work increasingly, people are also doing more hybrid travel, which we call it. So basically combining work and leisure during their trip. So how, what challenges does that pose to hotel design? I mean, for me, it's a, it's a great opportunity and it's um it's a, it's a really interesting conversation we have with our clients. You're trying to create spaces that actually work for all sorts of different aspects of someone's life and they might want to, you know, have a massage or they might bring their family along when they go on a business trip. So they want to work in their room, but they also want to maybe dine there or they want to relax there or they want to do all sorts of other things. So we need to design hotels and hotels are small. So, you know, you can only do so much in, in one room, but we need to design them to be flexible environments where people can do all sorts of different things. And I think that's probably part of the reason why we don't really see that many desks in rooms anymore because actually people want to use their space more flexibly, they work in all sorts of different ways and maybe they just want a nice big table or they might want to be sitting on an armchair. So we need to think about this different ways of how people use their room. But also of course, what's offered in a hotel and we see much more animation of public areas, for example. Um And of course, the the wellness aspect which has kind of gotten into pretty much everything that we do in terms of design, very interesting. So it doesn't really uh almost uh require more space in the room, but more smart use of different corners and furniture inside the room. So, so last year on the same stage, Tony and I discussed how A I is changing the way designers work. So you said at that time, uh you're just beginning to test it, experiment with it. So, a year on. So what has happened um in your team, for example, um how have you changed perhaps your perception about A I? Um we're very ambivalent about it and I think a lot of designers probably, probably agree with that. Um We're using, we're using it a lot more for um research tasks. We're using it a lot for um image manipulation for research. Um We use it a lot for, I guess the kind of maybe slightly more, more menial tasks um where we're a little bit more um cautious about it is by actually using it as a driver for design. And we like the kind of more analog storytelling, but we like to then use A I to facilitate that to speed things up to speed up processes. And what I'm very excited about is that hopefully in the future A I can start working with us on the drawing packages. Um and the kind of more menial tasks that have a lot of human error. And I think that's somewhere where I'm very excited to see more of it. So my understanding is A I uh can, can contribute in during the the process sort of in the middle of the process that you initiate the project, you give it the original idea and then at the end of it, you make the final decision on the whatever curation, the decision making uh stays with human beings. Great. I can't wait to delve into some of your amazing projects. Let's have a look. So tell us about these projects. Amazing. So this one, this one is Park Hyatt Jakarta. You're probably familiar with the Park Hyatt brand. Um And you're probably familiar with um with the great city of Jakarta. That's one of the kind of crazy busy um very vibrant um Asian metropolises. And um what we try to do here is really to, to bring a little bit of Indonesia as a country of I think 17,000 islands, different languages and huge amounts of kind of nature and um natural resources into, into the the urban context. And that was the inspiration here. This is the lobby area, this is the lobby area on the ground floor. So this is basically the first thing people encounter. Um And we worked together with a um with a Indonesia based um art consultancy who helped us creating artworks that are very much craft based. And that's something that was very much part of the story also with everything that we put into the interior. Yeah, that's more and more we see in Chinese hotels as well. Craft mansion. And this is, it's another Park Hyatt um very different one. This is actually in Shanghai, China, which thankfully here, people are aware of. If you talk to anyone in Europe, they say Shanghai and I said, well, city of 11 million people you've never heard of, but it's a fantastic city, it's a media city. You, you're probably all familiar with how, how vibrant and how um how future thinking and future facing it is. So this is actually in an ultra high rise building which is quite exciting, has its own kind of challenges. Um And what we try to do here is to create a bit of an urban oasis. I mean, that's a very much used term. Um But in a city like Shanghai, you you really kind of need that. Um and it's picking up both on, on the the the kind of Asian heritage of Chinese heritage, but also creating something that brings that into a very modern context. Changsha is actually very well known uh in China for the entertainment industry. So it's a very vibrant and young city, next one. Well, now we're going into a slightly different um place. So this is the Taj the trees in Mumbai. Um And for all of you familiar with the Taj plan, you're probably surprised to see something that's so kind of contemporary looking, I guess. Um And the, the exciting thing about this was that um we worked together with a very forward thinking, very um contemporary client um who wanted to create something that fits within what he was doing in his own compound and wanted to be part of that, but he wanted to, as coming from a, a, an old Indian family work with, you know, the heritage company that Taj is. Um and Taj has been amazing in giving us the opportunity to create something that's maybe outside of their comfort zone. Um But allowing us to, to, to do something that kind of merges their brand, um their brand um ideas and their brand kind of direction with something much more contemporary, very curious last year uh when you were on the same stage, um you actually uh this hotel just opened had just opened for a few months. So a year on, based on all the feedback you've uh you've been given, what are the design elements that have worked particularly well in the hotel? And if given a chance you can make some revisions, what would that be? Well, you know, unfortunately, as a designer, um you always want to make revisions, you know, you always thought things are not quite right. But I think the, the nicest thing that I've heard is um is, is a colleague of mine who is from Mumbai saying that her friends actually go there for kind of weekend retreats. And I thought that was fantastic because it's slightly outside of the city center. It was always intended to be a bit of sad. But at the same time, they're saying when they were staying there for the weekend, there was all these kind of conferences and business meetings and things going on because it was meant to be part of the the local community. So, so those are two key things we wanted to achieve. And it's great to hear that that seems to have happened. So, staycation, that's what we call it is becoming a trend. So people go to the hotel, not necessary to another city, but they can just have a um relax weekend um in in the center of the city. Perhaps this is a residential place in Hong Kong. So this is um this is actually a, a villa which um you know, everybody familiar with the size of apartments in Hong Kong would know it's unusual to have, have, have, have that much space. Um But it's, it's outside of the um it's outside of the city center. It's a, it's a big new development. Um But Kundig um and we designed um a couple of the, the, the larger villas in there um wanting to create something that is away from the typical luxury. Um that's very layered. Um That's, that's maybe, you know, quite glam. We want it to be something that's very understated, sophisticated and feels like something where people can just breathe out and relax. Um and, and be in an environment that is soothing for the soul. So that was very contemporary and neat, feeling great and this doesn't center point, but this is actually a great example of what we talked about urban heritage. Um This is a very interesting building. It's a 1966 tower that was built in the center of London as a, as a, as a, um, an office building. Not for a particular kind, but a speculative. Um It was a pioneer in um concrete construction. Um And it's empty for a very long period of time because it didn't really work at all. So, um our client purchased this, um around 2012, something like that. Um And we then set into completely refurbishing it as an architect and interior designer to turn it into residential, which has been very successful. Um I think they only have two or three units back. They're not cheap. So um they're definitely kind of quite high end, but it's a very unique place to live and it takes a particular persons having to choose to live there. How many flats are there? It's only about 80. So it's not that many. Um They are quite large foot plates. We've got two lifts. So you have either only two people sharing one lift core or you have your own lift core. So it's, it obviously is AAA really quite luxurious and unusual setup. You completely change the function on in the use use of this building. And this is I believe in Tokyo, this is in Tokyo. Um I, I'm a huge fan of Japan. Um This is in Kita Aama um in the city center. Um It's a residential, freestanding residential building. It's amazing to get the opportunity to do that. Um It really showcases um Japanese concrete work, which is absolutely exquisite. There's only about 16 apartments in the building, so they're very, very sizable. Um And the building um the building shape was really coming from um from, from um space regulations in, in, in Tokyo overlooking um et cetera, but it was then inspired by um by Mount Fuji, which is actually visible from there. Um And to have that kind of stepping in the, in the, in the architecture to not look unin, right? So it's uh the mountain is at the far end of the, the, the the stepping back to it and the, the terraces that have been created. It's amazing. Right? Next one is the hotel actually in this is here. It's a restaurant in Macau. Yes, it's in the Four Seasons Hotel. Um And it's called o it's a very casual Japanese Ramen restaurant. It doesn't look very casual, but this is casual four Seasons style. Um But the idea is really for people to come have a have a beautiful bowl of noodles and we showcased the making of it from the very beginning. And that was part of the design process. They have these amazing stock pots where they make the, the noodles. And we wanted to bring that experience to all of the people eating there. So they can actually see how it's made. They can see how the stocks are created um and then enjoy the results of that very immersive. And the last one is um in downtown Melbourne. It is. Yes. So my husband is Australian. So this was close to, close to the heart. Um It is a loom place which is actually um a company owned by Ring Thai who some of you may be familiar with. Um It's a long stay short stay um concept. And so this is for people living there at times, for months or weeks. Um but also for people, you know, just staying there as guests. But the most exciting thing is that installation in the center, which was based on the history of a printing house that this building was um and working together with an aboriginal artist to create an inspired version of that great, fantastic. We've gone through uh the pictures and they, they just shows all your projects embrace a wide range of cultures, contexts and scales. Um Thank you very much, Tina know very much for all these amazing work and all the insights and thinking behind all these projects. Thank you very much.

Alexander Groves, co-Founder, A.A.Murakami, Ismail Tazi, Founder, TRAME Moderator: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Brainstorm Design 2024: Ephemeral Tech

Alex, welcome Ismael. So we're gonna be talking about Ephemeral Tech. An ephemeral tech I believe is a, a name, a phrase you yourself and your partner Azumi came up with. Can you tell us about ephemeral tech? Yes. So a femo tech is really our approach to how technology can be used in the arts. And this is a perfect example of what we call a femo tech, which is our New Spring project from 2017. And it consists of a large metal tree that is producing these mist filled bubbles that can be filled with scent, different scents you can explore around the tree and they remain unbroken on different fabrics or carpets. And so it's a very delicate fleeting moment and there's a lot of code that goes in to the, there's a big kind of digital component that we work on, but where you meet the work is not one that fills that technology and there's a lot of custom made hardware as well. So we engineer it all ourselves. We don't use anything off the shelf, but where you meet the work is this fleeting ephemeral moment. It's not through your normal tech interfaces. Of screens or projections or led arrays. And so it's something that we're really passionate about is materials and the way that they make you feel and these kind of the tactile quality um of the real world. And um yeah, so that's um beautiful. I was lucky to witness this a couple of times actually, Salon Del Mob when it debuted with cos, but then it's also shown in art galleries of pace. Yes. Correct, isn't it? Yeah. And, and co actually toured it to Miami for Art Basel and then they took it to Shanghai to launch their online retail. Um So it's been around the world and um we continue to evolve this technology. And then the project we did the following year, 2018 was called Infinity Blue. And it carried on this idea of ephemeral tech. So Eden project is in Cornwall in the south of England and it's a big Biodome in an old form China clay quarry. It's an extraordinary place. It's the biggest rain forest in captivity in the world. And it's in these former China clay quarries. And we wanted to use the material of China clay. So we made a big ceramic sculpture and the brief of the project was, you know, excites people about the natural world. And so we work with scientists down there, we became interested with how life formed on earth and particularly with CYO bacteria. So this is an algae that forms in our oceans. It evolved 3.8 billion years ago. And it's the first organism to undertake photosynthesis. So it's really responsible for oxygenating our planet for 70% of the oxygen we breathe now is from this extraordinary organism, CYO bacteria. So like blue green algae and, and yes, 70% of the oxygen we breathe is from this. And yet most people don't know about it. We didn't know about it until we researched it and our existence absolutely depends on it. And so it was worth celebrating. And we made a big monument that's in the shape of cyanobacteria. This is a robot 3d printing clay and this is in the shape of cyanobacteria. And the ripples through the surface of it are also like how cyanobacteria grows. And they made these huge ceramic tiles. It's actually the biggest ceramic sculpture in the world. It's 10 m high. But we didn't want to just make a sculpture. The remarkable thing about cyanobacteria is what it does that it breathes and we are exchanging breath with it. So we wanted to add an element where we can visualize the fact that it's releasing oxygen in the form of these O rings. And so we made this technology that makes fog rings and they're populated amongst this tower that has these fog rings are embedded into the ceramics. So the technology is embedded in there and then the cladding of the ceramic tiles goes on top and it's, it was a huge undertaking and it has to operate every day except Christmas Day. A million visitors a year. This place, what size again is this 10 m high and weighs 20 tons and, and this is inside it. So it looks like a kind of submarine inside. And then this is, this isn't digitally manipulated or to think this is real photography that we took of it. Releasing these f this is not a bot image that's a real photograph from 2018. So, yeah. Um and at Azusa as is, yeah, my wife and partner in the studio is standing there and this continually uh pumps out this. Yeah. Uh oxygen rings. Yeah, these fog rings and um they can be CED as well and they can travel 30 m, they can travel the length of this space. And we've taken that technology and we've toured around the world actually. So without the big ceramic thing, we've been able to kind of tour it. And so the next evolution of it is called Passage of RA. And we showed this in Paris in the Grand Palais and this is an extension this led from. And what we did here was we added a digital component. So when the F passes through the physical space, it then hits the screen and it becomes a digital fing and it enters this live generated ocean, it ripples the water. So the physics of our world is affecting the physics of the digital world and this fing that's so fleeting has this digital afterlife. So, and this is our project M plus currently showing there until the second of February next year. And it's called Beyond The Horizon. And it's all about our love of bubbles. Again, bubbles are always used as a kind of momentum more like a meditation on the fleeting nature of existence. And they're also interestingly very like integral to science theory because um you know, there's this chicken and a question, what came first with the first cell, the first living cell, was it the cell wall that contained and protected that delicate chemistry from just dissolving and drifting off in the ocean? Or was it the nucleus that dictated build a cell wall? And so it's a chicken egg like how could one come before the other? But then there's the scientific experiments in the fifties, Miller experiments. So they recreated the primordial soup in a flask zapped it with some lightning and they found it was self generating these fatty bubbles of amino acids, the building blocks of life. And that out of that came this theory that the first living cells and our, you know, ancestors were actually bubbles and then they evolved to become to grow cell walls. And so there's a fascinating kind of for all bubbles. And then we're also interested in clouds and clouds of a long tradition in Chinese art. They age different Chinese art by the style of the clouds depicted. And so we wanted to create a space where we had these giant foggy clouds kind of populating a space and much like the emperor's robe that we just showed you. And this is what we did at M plus. And so we had these machines that make these clouds and they get strung to this trust and then they spread around the space. There's 12 of them and they're all individually making these clouds and they're really giant soap bubbles with fog inside them. And when you make bubbles on that scale, they lose their round shape and they become these amorphous shapes that um uh I like the kind of auspicious crowds that you see. So this is on as M plus. Yes. Yeah, in a large scale room. So this, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's the large space that they've got in B two, which is dedicated to art and it's, it, they're all working independently. Sometimes you go and it's dark and there just be one bubble emerging from this machine and then suddenly they all release at once. So um it's really uh it's really us using the medium of time um as the kind of subject and as a medium because it's a kind of fleeting moment. And if you, there's a moon gate in the space and then you go through to the next room, which is a large version of passage of ra the largest, we've done. And um that uh is also about, you know, the fleeting nature of it, the origin of the name it was ra is the Egyptian Sun God that, you know, every day would go under us in a solar barge um to rise each morning as the sun. And so, um it was really thinking about afterlife and um uh the fact that in a way when we look at a fog ring, we identify that I think this is really what gets to the nub of what we're interested in. The femoral tech is when you're experiencing something through a screen, that thing is not going to change, it's not going to age, it's not mortal, it doesn't have that vulnerable vulnerability that we have. And when you experience nature, like the falling of cherry blossom or the falling of snow, there's an awareness that it's a fleeting moment in this kind of eternal universe. And we ourselves the fleeting moments, sharing one combined fleeting moment that will never come again. And I think that gives you a kind of profound uh power that is difficult to get through digital art that doesn't really change your age. So this is core to what we we're going to move on to now, which is this conflation of digital digital being the origin of some work, but not necessarily the conclusion and combining the two which where we bring in uh Ismael and uh am MS latest projects just launched a few weeks ago in Marfa, Texas and Ismael. You're the founder of to Paris and a company that started focusing more on traditional craft, young designers, working with craftsmen and craftswomen in the Mediterranean. But you slowly started to embrace technology to really bring this concept to life. Please tell us a little more about your origin and what tram does and how you come to commission this piece we're going to see. Sure. So I started coming in 2020 as you said, we focus on traditional craftsmanship. I was as I was born and raised in Morocco. So in a city that is 12th centuries old, the capital of craft, capital of culture. But since I was a kid, I was always surprised that there hadn't been any innovation since in, in when you go too fast, the Medina, the mosaic, the Village, the colors, the materials. So what I was always interested in innovating in craftsmanship and what we are doing is digital craftsmanship. One collection we did was a 3d print in clay hand glazed, inspired by the mathematics, the algorithms of Alam and Dalia in Spain. And then we did generative tapestries in aus. We did mirrors um generative stained glass. So for me, it's about um the own chain. So digital provenance and the off screen and the physical aspects of the work. And that's a concept that I bonded over with, with your middle period projects with Tram was working with digital artists again, with digital provenance, but not only making a digital work on NFT, making a physical piece as well. And you kind of pioneering this, I remember meeting Alex now and this project which we will now go into deeper um called a 1000 Layers of Stomach. You debuted at Marfa Texas, the home of modernist minimalist. The mecca of modernist minimalists are Donald Judd. Very physical. It's an incongruous I would have felt positioning but there is reason for this. Yes. Yes. So um Marfa is the home of our blocks uh gallery which is the lead intern of art platform uh in the world. And every year there is a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage that happens in October, November where you have hundreds of artists ao of art and of design enthusiasts who go to Marfa. And uh and it makes total sense to actually launch this project there. Alex also in the past has launched a project on our blogs online. So a generative art collection. So it was, it was actually it made total sense and it is, well, let's talk about 1000 layers of stomach. You come up with great titles. Well, II, I mean, I have to say the best titles we get are actually from Chinese menus that have been translated into English. And uh we, we've done a few and if we have it at lunch today, no, I don't think so. Um But uh yeah, 1000 stomach I, I found it was a very poetic title. Very Sublime. And uh II I love coming to Hong Kong for many years now and it really inspired this project. So what I love is that you've got this kind of fishing village that's grown into this amazing city across the bay. You've got Shenzhen and in between, you've got this um tidal mud flats with these kind of crawling with life when the, when the tide goes out and the sun comes up, it's, it's incredible. And I particularly interested with clams and clams are like evolutionary wise, 500 million years ago, they evolved and they haven't really changed much since and they don't have a brain, they just have a kind of few nerves. Um but they have this extraordinary ability, they're like little 3d biological printers and they have this incredible generative code within them. And they can make these exquisite abstract art patterns on their shelves. And we really studied the emergent patterns, which goes into a lot of maths and stuff. And we created our own code that can mimic the behaviors of these emergent patterns. And each time you run the code, it always comes up with completely different pattern. But of course, we didn't want to leave it as a digital code. We want to turn it back into our physical world. And so we converted those patterns into knit patterns and these are the kind of knit, knitting patterns ready to knit. They're all using that algorithm that's based on nature. And we made our own knitting machine that you can manipulate the code. There's different dolls. So people in Marfa could go up to the screen, they could change the parameters on it. And then when they get to a pattern, they like they can press knit and it goes into a knitting cue and it gets knitted immediately. So it's very immediate and it's um very intuitive. And um and did you, you made this knitting machine? Well, I mean, you hacked the knitting. So it's a 19 eighties Japanese knitting machine that we stripped back. Recast, changed. The computer had to write our own. It was a very closed program that ran it. So we had to write our own um operating software for it and everything has changed except the kind of mechanism basically. And uh this is admitting a textile on site in Marfa based on the algorithms based on a clam. And, and I think this is something we bond over is the future of how generative can come into production. Because there isn't really a reason why um sometimes with clothes lines that they all have to look the same, they could always be unique um the same code but generating a different pattern and uh also kind of knitting on demand um rather than, you know, over um production. And so this applies actually to all digital publication and manufacturing uh tools. So I think, as you mentioned earlier, I think the future is where artists and and brands and designers will actually express their creative vision both digitally and physically from day one. And we would be able to produce in series unique pieces. Yeah. And as an artwork, we're envisaging having several machines come together to form these giant autonomous knitting clam robots that will be, you know, suspended in a large space and knitting out these textiles. And what we saw in Marvel was it first iteration its first. But this is a mat for something that happened. So we're going to bring the project to Hong Kong in March for Art Basel and then it's going to go to Beijing and, and then to Europe to different museums and each time it's gonna grow the textile. Um Yeah, and this is a in your practice um Am Aami but also studio swine your other studio. Um Filmmaking is integral to the documentation, I suppose was these fleeting tech moments and then turning into physical artifacts. But documenting the process has always been a key element and you called yourselves once um designers of mass communication rather than mass production, which I'm intrigued by. But tell us a little more about the filmmaking angle. Yeah. And how important it is. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we graduated in a time where it was very much like the feeling was we don't need another chair. We've probably got more chairs than people and so like, how can you justify being a designer and kind of adding to the amount of stuff out there? But then we always thought that um the reason why you need new chair designs is like, you need new love songs or poetry is that you've got to express your times, but you don't need to make a lot of them. You can, you, you can actually uh we make films that would be traveling the world telling the story of how something is made using design as a form of journalism or almost, and the film can be the thing that gets viewed millions of times and maybe you just make a few chairs or whatever we end up making. So, yeah, we're interested in this. Um We love working with film. Um Well, it creates not only a document so it's just you say journalistic, but it creates another artwork in a sense, it's another layer of the story and the future of. Are you going to be working together more this project will, as you've hinted, should be showing in, in our puzzle and the thing will grow. But have you since your relationship developed, have you inspired any other ideas amongst yourselves to work on? Because the core to this, as we said is digital provenance, but physical conclusion. Yeah, Alex actually sits at that intersection of design and web three. Web and Web three totally gets it like he's one of the few designers and who works with our blocks. And he is native to both Web two and Web three. So we have many, many ideas. He totally gets what we're trying to achieve. And I think uh uh you know, you introduced us actually in Singapore and any other drink. Thank you for that. So, uh yeah, we, we have some more ideas that we'll share in the future, but we can't wait to see how this, the world's biggest textile I would imagine is going to evolve over the next few months or a few years and see what else you get up to. But thank you so much for this extraordinary introduction to Ephemeral Tech, Alexander Groves, Ismael Tazi. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Arin Bhowmick, Chief Design Officer, SAP, Dan Makoski, Former Chief Design Officer, UnitedHealth Group, Greg Petroff, Former Chief Design Officer, Cisco Security, Victoria Spaulding-Burford, VP Product Design, Salesforce (virtual), Gordon Ching, Founder and CEO, Design Executive Council

Brainstorm Design 2024: The Customer Connection

Arin Bhowmick, SAP, Dan Makoski, UnitedHealth Group, Greg Petroff, Cisco Security, Victoria Spaulding-Burford, Salesforce (virtual), Gordon Ching, Founder and CEO, Design Executive Council

Mario Klingemann, Artist, Botto, In conversation with Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Brainstorm Design 2024: Androids and Their Connection to Electric Art

I think this one is gonna be fas fascinating 20 minutes with Mario where we are going to discuss Boto, the Decentralized Autonomous artist and the man who created Botto originally Mario. Before we get into the details on Botto, could you give us some insight and context to where you started? I believe you're a graphic designer working for nightclubs in Germany. Well, it's always difficult to kind of map my career because I always followed kind of what I was interested in most at a certain time and it was usually something that couldn't be taught. So yes, I was always fascinated by doing things with computers and code. And in the early nineties, there was a great opportunity because techno became really big in Germany where I'm from and they needed always kind of weird crazy graphics. So I became a graphic designer by writing Photoshop filters myself using algorithms. And this is when early, not really 1991 90 92 round. And uh so I would call it early generative art because in the end, yeah, you write an algorithm but then you add some sliders to it and get infinite variations and that's kind of my technique of, of doing my work and being kind of like the computer guy like that, which is also like, not really the label I want to have. But uh well as we all know, kind of the world evolved, the internet came along. So that's when those the same people said like, oh, there's a thing called website. So do you know what this is? So I made websites, then I made the video kind of like for German TV, on a computer, not on some million dollar machine. So it was always this end. But I always try to bring I'm lazy in that sense. So I love to spend like two days on an algorithm that then can do something for me a million times on the press of a space bar. So and yeah, so ultimately kind of that brought up the questions, what other things of myself can I replace with a machine? And of course, you said to me earlier that you always wished for an A I to do the things you didn't want to do even in those early days. So yeah, even like I think in 1989 I read this book by Marvin Minsky uh Society of Mind. I think it's called, which already promised all these amazing things like how a machine could make its own decisions and but it was all just graphics and it was really theoretical. So it took until me until like 2015 when deep learning kind of arrived on the scene and had all these amazing uh kind of results like, oh finally, you could detect the dog with 90% probability in an image. But I already knew this is just kind of you always have to kind of see the potential that's coming. And the moment I saw that this is going to be the next thing I jumped on for me, deep dream. Maybe you remember these psychedelic weird images. Uh That was the first time when you could reverse the process from just saying, classifying things to turning something like some numbers into an image. And yeah, so that was also the moment when it became clear that well, it could go beyond that. And uh yeah, I see really like, you know, grandfather's X, this thing where you start with an X and then you replace the handle, replace the Natalie Sharp in the end, like I tried to do that with myself saying, OK, which other parts and of course, that the thing like creativity itself and especially deciding whether something is interesting is good. Can that be replaced with a machine? And then when would you? So boto was born? Well, I mean, the idea for boto he conceive. So it came into the world in 2021. But I think the first time I wrote up the concept was 2018. And but as with any ideas that are maybe too early. I didn't find kind of, I have patterns. So, and sometimes I can go to them and say, oh, look like I have another idea. But in that case, they went for the memories of passers by first, which as we heard was made, eventually was sold at Sotheby's, which was nice. So, but yeah, that thing was in the drawer for another two years. Uh, it helps that then around, like with the pandemic, the Blockchain, the whole crypto world started exploding and suddenly people started seeing, oh yeah, there is actually something to it and then yeah, it took a year to build it. And yeah, in 2021 it bottle came into the world. Great. So now you're going to over the next few minutes give a a clear explanation of how Botto works for the layman and what you mean exactly by decentralized autonomous artist. So first, what does that mean? And how does botto work? Well, let me put this first. So really what I want to create with bottle or is like my answer to the question, can a machine be an artist? And especially now where everybody is becoming an artist by just entering some text. So that's the question like what is it? Is it just being able to produce pretty pictures that makes an artist? No, you have to create a compelling biography. And so that's how Botto is built up. So yes, underneath bottle is really a machine that produces images and tries to sell them. And by selling them, it makes money that keeps it alive. But there are some aspects to it. And I'd like to call the system more like the bottle Trinity. And I also like to call it like an inverse cyborg because this is how boto Trinity we're seeing on the screen. Yes. So explain simple terms how the Trinity works. The inverse cyborg idea is like unless like you do not have a human augmented by a machine, but you have a machine augmented by humans. And this works by these three parts. One is of course, the A I, well, whatever that is like the all the algorithms, the models that produce images and text. But then there is a human community in form of a so called DAO which is a Decentralized autonomous organization. It's kind of a, well, you could say it's company in the Blockchain, but it's a little bit different. But yeah, so community, it's a community that everybody can join and when you join it, you can make decisions and how do you, how do you become a, well, that's where the bottle token comes in or the economy comes in. So you have like just like, you know, Ethereum Bitcoin, there is a coin called bottle, which I call the lifeblood or the pulse and you can actually track the success of bottle in its chart. So you have to acquire bottle and then you stake it in a smart contract. It's kind of like you deposit it there and once it's deposited, you are part of the dow and you are allowed to vote on the books. They bought a small investment or a small, you can, well, you can join for free but you can uh the more you have stake in something, the more you can also profit from it. Because that is the kind of maybe the interesting part about botto. It is not so half of the proceeds. It may come to that later. With the process. We have a lovely graphic. So the process of how botto works, you have the dow which is influence it. So that's the community that teaches it. Is it art teacher boto go to art school. But the big question is like, why should the machine do any kind of art or what art should it make? So you could of course randomize it totally. But let's say realistically a fresh A I does not have any motivation to go in any direction. And that's where the humans come in that guide it. So bottle produces really constantly knew what we call fragments. It's like proto art. It's really, it prompts itself randomly by creating originally based on, on your taste. No. Oh, that's very important. No, no, no, no. Oh Actually, I have to take a step back here. I didn't want to influence the machine at all with my, so what it does is really like a shotgun approach to possibilities. So because that's what I believe is the best way to cover all possible directions. If it would only be my aesthetics, then, well, it would be a clone of myself and that was not the plan. It would be scary. Yeah. So bottle like uh roams through late in space and tries to get in any direction and builds up a huge pile of potential artworks right now. I think we are at five or 6 million that no human has ever seen. But once a week it selects 350 fragments. So thousands and thousands of fragments we boil once a week, it selects itself. So model using the taste model, it's like 350. Yeah. So it's like a curator in its own affairs, but that's when the voting comes in. So the humans uh get to see kind of like the proposals and can put votes on it. And in the end of the of every round, which takes a week, the one that got the most votes gets eventually minted on the Blockchain and set up for auction. That is when then there's the potential that it sells this and money comes back. But at the same time, those votes go back and trade in the taste model. So I'm the winner then learn that OK, this is popular. Actually, all the votes are all the vote. It's not only important what people like, it's also very important what they don't like. It's actually for me even more important because uh there are so many things directions you could go and we really create this kind of gravity of uh where it should show more and where it should show less. And unlike a human artist, it is kind of trying to please, right. A human artist should be kind of against the grain and really try to provoke some of the most successful try to please. Yeah, I mean, financially it's usually better to kind of go with what everybody likes. And if you, as you can see in bottles, art, it does a lot of things that are well agreeable. Well, let's look at some of the art. We have some slides, validating bottos success story over the last few years. Emerging press, we love. These are very early days. This is kind of from 2021 where there was not even these diffusion models like mid journey and all these available. So it was using a different technique. You can see a very clear kind of A I aesthetic, but I really thought out history aesthetic. Here. This is, yes, yes, yes. We have Edward Hopper. So here we can already see a little bit of a development when because what bottle works in is periods. So every period allows to add new models to it. And every period also has a theme which there's always 12 being proposed by bottle by the machine botto again, is deciding it and then the dow again, votes on what should we do next. And every theme comes with like a slogan and it becomes even like a prompt. And so it's like a several nested feedback loops here which and you can see some development that you can see how, let's say their quality, their style. So now it became more post photographic, I would say, and it's quite interesting to watch because not only the machine is learning here. What is for me is interesting, the human doll, which is kind of really people with art background, people without a lot of people who come from crypto, of course, and they all kind of pull in different directions and eventually, well, you get this essence and right now it seems they, they liked a lot, the photographic work. So you're seeing tastes change from both the human interpretation of votes, but also, but now 350 images such as this are produced a week for the Dow and the general public to vote, which is, which is interesting. So you don't have to be a member of the Dow. You don't have to have invested to actually vote on this. And um what we've got here, we hope it works is this week's or the last couple of days. Actually, the new round started the day before yesterday. I always mix up the time zones. But yeah, so every Tuesday uh is kind of where the next fragment is decided and immediately the new round star portfolio of work is there for the doubt to vote but also for the general public. And should I let's take a demonstration of where we are? So what you see is kind of like, I think you might have been given like information how to access it. So this is the the voting. It is really, you just scroll down. It's really like you're going through uh kind of like Instagram. And then right now I have 100 voting points which is kind of uh not a lot. So if you're a layman, if you just, but it's really to feel it out and then I can just say, OK, this is like for me, this is kind of boring. So it, it has typical A I cliches. So I give minus seven. This is also terrible. So really? So I don't know. So what you can see is that boto does not really have a single style and uh like usually kind of you would like to have an artist to have a very discernible visual style. What boto does have is a kind of, it has recurring themes and I find it quite fascinating to watch uh too, too typical. No, I hate it. So I'm, I'm more of the critical 10, do we get something loaded up? There we go. Oh No, no. Yeah. But I mean, there are these things like themes coming up, there's often like robots and machine hybrids. OK. Something typically abstract that might work nice on a kind of doctor's waiting room, I guess. Oops, I zoomed in and uh oh, actually I like this one personally need to get more of an idea of your title. And so yo you should note that, of course, botha creates all the descriptions for the for the works itself. Um And yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it analyzes them and uh like depending on what it sees, it, it never repeats any titles. So uh today the selection is, oh, actually, I like this. This is kind of post photographic glacial frame, kind of nice. So after the selection process, um many, many thousands of people voting, you have one winner. Yes. For the there's always a single winner. And yeah, that gets minted, gets put up for auction and if it sells and fortunately for the last 2.5 years, every single one sold typically, like, I mean, I don't know if you followed along the whole crypto kind of ups and downs. That was really kind of the winter and well, but still it went for about like 10,000 $15,000 every week. So in what happens then if it sells half of the proceeds are distributed among everybody who voted in that round, depending on how many voting points you spend. So, it's a little bit so the more stake you have in the game, the more you can win. But even if you don't purchase the artwork yourself, no, no, you don't have to get a share of the proceedings. Yeah. And it's quite interesting because, I mean, most of the people who are voting cannot afford bottos art, but you can shape kind of where boto is going to. So it is in your interest that itself. Well, and that's also the other question like, do you vote by your personal taste or do you vote because you think this will sell. So you have constantly this inner conflict dilemma, this dilemma like pity and commerce. Yes. Yeah. And, and that's what makes it interesting there. So, so an interesting economic model, 50% to the community who have voted and if 50% goes to Bo Treasury to keep the service running. Um Well, I mean, there is of course, and that's the other thing Boto does not try to kind of do kind of puppet play. So it's clear there are certain things that an A I at this point of time cannot like for example, take a call from Sotheby's saying like, oh, we want to auction it. There has to be still a human uh picking up the phone or answering the email. So there is a human team that gets paid and uh kind of, oh, I get a little bit payment even. But because Yeah, I have to take care for bringing in new models. But the nice thing is the more technology progresses, the less humans will have to do. So, we are now at the very future. That's what I'm intrigued about this. It's still very early days. So he, he's an infant, he's still in nursery, um the future. So how do you see it? It's becoming totally autonomous and able to vote for his own work. Yes. So one of the things is that both should be able to, to have more of a word itself. But what for me is the most interesting aspect is we have a potential to create a truly immortal artist here and not sure if that's a good thing, right? If you look at the art market, usually at least for the for the heirs, it's more beneficial. If the artist at some point leaves and stops making more work, it's always a good move young. Yes, that so bottle has the should never die. But yeah, what does it mean? So what I find interesting is that aspect of altruism in A I because as we can see the A I doesn't need all that money it makes. So why not share it with the world and do some good. And so for now, it might be just the people who are believing in boto and helping. But ultimately, the could also decide, OK, Boto should uh create a foundation like I don't know, if it becomes a billionaire, I hope it's uh able to also then think about other things than how it could change the world it would come. Yes. Move from being an artist to a politician. A I these are fascinating considerations. I hope that made sense. It did to me the second time around. I think it's a fascinating area, machines and humans and how taste is controlled or how taste is steered is fascinating and the future of this we will watch very carefully. So, thank you very much, Mario. Thank you. Thank you, Botto. Round of applause for Mario and botto. Thank you.

Vanessa Cho, Design Partner, Google Ventures, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design At Scale

Vanessa. Thank you for being here. It's great to see you, Vanessa uh came direct from uh Seoul and we were worried that she wasn't gonna quite get out of the airport for a moment there. But uh we're delighted to, to have you, Vanessa. You're really uh you have a unique perspective in our program today because you were looking at design from the investment side, which is a really fascinating uh uh perspective. Tell us a little bit about GV, uh Google Ventures as it, as it's known where it kind of sits in the organization and, and how uh how it came to be. Yeah, for sure. So GV is a venture capital firm. Uh It's backed by alphabet, but it is a non strategic which explains our diverse investments in all different types of industries. May it be consumer tech or enterprise software, life sciences or frontier tech? You know, we have around 10 billion in terms of a um we're a multistage everything from incubation all the way to late stage. And I'd say it's just like we have over 400 active portfolio companies right now. It's just like with our notable investments being Slack or stripes. Uber Nest, uh duo security and one medical. So it really spans a variety of different, uh different sectors. It does. Yes. Absolutely. This is like anything where it's just like the intersection of the industry, technology and accelerating it to actually make. And it's like disruptive changes. We're probably having a conversation. One thing that's really notable about TV is it has this really kind of world class design team which, you know, a lot of venture funds don't really think to have a staff of designers to offer a perspective. Tell us about that and why, why Google is structured that way and what does your team look like? Yeah, for sure. It's just like, I mean, what we'll say is like a GV, we just believe that design is critical for a success for a successful company. So in it's baked into our DNA, it's core to our DNA so much so that when GV was first opening up its stores and hiring its first batch of investors, we hired a design partner and then had built out a design team. And so I think the thing is, is like, there's a reason why TV actually has the longest running, you know, design team in venture capital. It's just something we fundamentally actually believe in. I happen to run the design fund along with him. It's like two colleagues, Kate Aronovitz, who ran design at uh you know, Facebook or Meta and linkedin and then Michael Margolis, arguably one of the best, if not the best user researchers in our start up industry as well. And together the three of us, we act as coaches advisors, sometimes therapists, you know, it's just like, but mostly as truth bearers to our founders who are looking to learn how to actually leverage design and user research to actually mitigate, you know, just like an accelerate business decisions. So tell us about the different levels of maturity of the different companies in your portfolio. Are they mostly kind of later stage start ups or are they, do you have also early stage and, and kind of where are they in there? Yeah, for sure. No, we have everything, we have the whole whole blend of everything as well. It's just like anything from stripe, you know, which arguably is just like our friend, you know, this like incredibly esteemed colleague, Katie Dill is running that particular design team to, you know, just like some times we have a person who doesn't even identify themselves. Yes, that is a founder. They have an idea, they're a subject matter expert and they're deciding if they actually should begin to like, take a bet on this assumption and if it is the right time and the right stage, that's really interesting. So Nick in his introduction, alluded a little bit to this question, but, you know, for, for these younger companies that are in the early stage of development design can often seen as this kind of nice to have rather than something that's essential. What do you say to, you know, early stage start ups about how they need to think about design? Yeah, I mean, I think what I would say is it's like it depends how you define design. If you're defining design as some mirror like visual polish, probably I would say it's not that essential for a start up because we're just trying to find product market fit. We're trying to figure out who our core customer is and how do we actually deliver an experience for them. Now, if you're talking about design with what we call a cat, the little d you know where it's all encompassing and it's just like I would say, it's absolutely essential. It would be similar to when we had said it's like, let's say you and I are building a house together. It's like Visual Polish is an interior decorator. We do not need to hire an interior decorator when we don't yet even know what the foundation of the house will be. Do. We need to hire an architect. Absolutely. We need to have conversations about like who is this family moving in? How large is this family? Now, how large will they actually be? How many bathrooms and bedrooms do we need to make sure it's accessible? How accessible is this building actually going to be? And so that's often the conversations we actually have and why we think it is so critical for design to actually have a role in a start up, it reduces cost, it saves money. And then to be honest, just being on the investing side, when a founder comes in for a pitch to actually ask for money, it is so clear and evident when they actually have a good foundation in design, it gives you a lot of confidence as an investor being like, oh, they're very close to the customer. They're listening to the customer, they can be nimble, they can be adaptive. They know how to actually build a scalable product. And they're always thinking about a trustworthy brand that actually can scale. Those are the things that we actually really think about, you know, day in day out. Yeah, and the skills of designers can really help them when things start not going well to identify where the problems are and how the business model needs to be adapted and adjusted, which is, which is so important. So tell us a little bit about your background and your journey to being a designer at, at GV. Yeah. So my background is uh we talked about this a little bit. I was born to Korean parents. My both my parents are Korean, but something a little bit unusual about me is my dad was a diplomat for the United Nations. So I am born and raised in Vienna, Austria. I lived there for the 1st 18 years of my life. Um And so the thing is that what you think about is Vienna Austria is just like, oftentimes I was surrounded and it's all true. I was surrounded by music, by art, by culture. You know, it's a slide, all of those things. But also if you meet someone that's from Vienna A Viennese, there's a level of appreciation or like a values of efficiency, timeliness and optimization. So I think I'm a perfect blend of a Viennese where it's like I have deep appreciation for aesthetic, but I'm also very pragmatic and that's kind of how I found myself, you know, very comfortable with the intersection of design and business. So being a kind of multicultural kid gives you this kind of broader spectrum of empathy and ability to kind of navigate different cultures. I think so. Yeah, I mean, I think so it's just like being a multicultural kid. I love how you define me. I'll take that any day. But this is like uh you know, believe it or not growing up in Austria, there were not that many Asians and quite frankly, there were not that many Koreans. And so at a very early age, I learned to live in a world that was not designed for me. Uh and it might sound very lonely and I think at times it probably was a little bit lonely. But for me now as a designer, I find that it's one of my superpowers that I actually have. Uh it's like, I never assume and experience is designed for me. I always ask who is that core customer that IC P that we're going after? You know, it's just like, what are their pain points? What behavior are we trying to change? And how are we making it as easy as possible for them? I think the other thing, you know, just like real superpower gave to me, it's like being an Austrian Korean is, is that I don't fit neatly into any box, you know, just like I show me a demographic survey that I can fill out where it says, please check here if you're a Kro Korean, Austrian, like that does not exist, you know, but I'll be very happy when it does. But because there was no box for me to check, there really is no playbook or a path for me to actually follow. I I'm pretty creative in terms of my perspective and the approaches that I actually take and that's really what's required in the start up world. Generally, we asked people to think about things differently and to also be bold, you can be bold, you need to be bold. One thing that we do at TV is just like, imagine, you know, it's like TV has a magic wand and we ask founders to be like, what is that one wish that you have that would really change dramatically and transformative, you know, the road map that you have and the conversations we have with our founders, some of the wishes are ambitious, but some of them are not bold enough, they're not bold enough. And one requires a real bold way of thinking, you know, just like to really differentiate yourself and elevate yourself from a noisy world of products right now. That's fascinating. So your role as a uh you know, being on the investor side is, is also from a design perspective, can be, I suspect part of a partly a challenge because you're not right in the, you know, the the the founders are very close to their customers, they may not know how to think about what their customers are looking for. Uh But they're, they're right, you know, at the coal face and as an investor, you're kind of one step removed from that. And sometimes you're with this company, sometimes you're with that company, you're not there around the clock. Does that little bit of distance get in the way, make it more of a challenge to have a true design insights or is it in some ways an advantage? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be in my position if I wouldn't think that I have a real unfair advantage as it. Like, I think the thing is, it probably comes in a couple of different ways. The first one is, is that I actually am just curious and I'm coming in with fresh eyes, right? And I have no biases built in. I don't know why or what the trade offs were that we built this platform in this particular way. I'm sure it was complicated, but all I care about is like, who's the customer, what is the pain point and what are we trying to achieve in terms of an outcome? So one I have like, you know, I have no biases. The second way is, is like, I am figuratively and literally, we are invested in the company, but I actually am not part of the team. And so because of that, I can ask very provocative and at times probably also obnoxious question uh that someone on the team probably cannot ask what would happen if we actually had to deliver the road map and half the time, what would we actually cut? Where is there a risk in the road map that no one's talking about? What is that quality bar? Are we hitting that? And why are we actually being challenged and not hitting that quality bar? Those are the questions that I can ask without any reputational risks that I actually have. Um And I think the other thing that an advantage that I have, you know, being on the outside in, it's just like we run hundreds of customer studies, right? It's like we have the techniques, the tips, the skills down. And so actually, I mentioned Michael Margolis, one of the best user researchers out there. He has figured out a technique to actually deliver customer insights at start up speed. In one day, he can deliver those particular things. And he just recently actually published a book, you know, it's free, it's a free playbook about customer. You can find it at learn more faster.com. It was like, I'd highly recommend it. It's just like, and it has all of our tips and tricks put in. And so because we just have the repetition, we are able to sit from the outside and actually provide those particular insights at all times, really amazing uh perspective. Um I wonder, you know, you work and travel in Asia quite a lot. I mean, this is, this is not so uncommon in Silicon Valley as a way to think about investment. Is it, is it the same in Asia or has Asia not yet figured out the power that design can add the value that design could add on the investment side? Oh, I don't, I mean, I always think it's just like it is not the same, but it is just like it's value and appropriate contextually appropriate for and it's just like the culture and the geography that we live in, I generally believe. And that's why I'm here. I want to learn everything we can here and bring it back to Silicon Valley. But then I also want to share some best practices as well. One thing that I find that I think is really interesting is it like, you know, when I can't compare it to European is just like, we don't have any hierarchy in terms of the best ideas in Silicon Valley. If you have a good idea, you actually are loud and obnoxious and you speak up. And that's something that, you know, just like at times is a cultural change with other cultures to make sure that hierarchy actually has no role in a product roadmap discussion. Fascinating uh Vanessa. This has been really educational and instructive, I think uh for us. Uh um and a lot of lessons and insights here for, for start ups uh in, in this region as well as globally. Thank you so much for making the time to be with us. Thank you so much for having me.

Gadi Amit, Founder, President & Principal Designer, NewDealDesign LLC, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2024: Tech For A Better Tomorrow

So Gotti. Gotti, welcome back to our Fortune brainstorm design stage. You were, you've been at our conference before and I did my research and at that conference, you shared some thoughts, maybe some mixed feelings about uh about design thinking and how businesses think about the design process before we get into kind of the meat of our session. I want to ask you, you know, what has your thinking on this changed? Are you still kind of wary of how businesses think about design and design thinking? Yeah, I do. Uh iii I did not change my opinions. I'm actually quite proud that I was one of the first uh critic of uh design thinking. Uh Luckily it's now uh kind of a has been uh we are um in a situation where obviously design thinking has been very forceful and very successful uh campaign. I do think that uh traditionally uh they've been uh under indexing on uh design talent and uh over indexing on linear processes where designers are exceptionally talented in uh nonlinear thinking, multichannel thinking where you could create ideas of products and systems that are uh beyond uh specific process or something like that. Uh I think nowadays there is a greater recognition of these type of, let's say, lacking on the design thinking side and, and you, I mean, you've worked in design for decades and I want to put up some slides as I ask this question, but kind of, you know, over the years of working in design, I mean, has your design philosophy changed, you know, as we kind of move to our more tech focussed internet focused A I focused world. Uh It's an interesting point. I actually would, would love to uh join Robert's comments. I think uh designers are great product guys, great system thinking guys and, and the ability to synthesize multichannel inputs into a coherent concept is really unique by designers and uh again, generally somewhat underestimated uh and very much in need today uh than we have than let's say a few decades ago. So I think uh my practice has been uh more towards that uh high level strategic if you wish uh capital letters design rather than the more traditional lower case design. Um Most of the projects we get today are open briefs. So we are not being asked to uh round the corners, quote unquote on, on, on concepts that other people created, but actually creating the concept that leads the, the venture forward. So let's talk about some of these new projects you're working on. And the first one we're gonna talk about is is serve robotic, you know, these, these delivery vehicles that run the streets, you know, what was kind of your, your idea in kind of designing this, you know, I'm, I'm using the word adorable little vehicle here. Yeah. So first of all, it was supposed to be adorable because uh it needs to be in the city and uh cities in California started blocking these uh and the whole emotional uh interaction between the object and, and the people around in the street was so important. So we designed it for uh emotions if you wish. And, and this was a big takeaway that now that we have intelligent things running around us, we need to create designs that are a lot more interactive emotive and approachable to humans. So, in doing so, we started using this formula of EQ over IQ uh EQ being the emotional qualities of the object rather than the traditional business uh thinking, functionality or even usability. Or I got to say maybe social is the new ecological. We've done a lot of work in ecological nowadays. We need to push uh social thinking uh beyond, beyond traditional product uh thinking. Um So you'll see an interesting video here which is the, the love and hate story of uh uh robots in the streets of Los Angeles call it. And who did this? Why did they, do you like that? They give you food too often out loud. Oh Man, Austin is all messed up. What happened to your office. Right? Perfect. Thank you. This is the second time I've stayed you all. So they are haters and their lovers. And it was designed for that. Actually, we gave them names because we utilize an mit research that shows that uh when robots are named, they are less harmed. So the fact that this person is actually uh referring to it as Austin in the name is actually wonderful. It's really that easy. You give a robot googly eyes and the name and it's, yep, it is, unfortunately, it is that simple at this, at this level. And, and you know, the, the image next to it is very important because serve was a design sketch. The name of a design sketch that became a product name that became a successful company. It's a spun off and they now an independent company. They just went IP O and they spun off Uber and I think they're delivering about 2000 of these uh this year. So somehow the formula works, but you're also, you're also now tackling problems that kind of, let's say, primarily originate from the digital space and I'm just going to zoom. Oops, there we go. Yeah. So we do have a pandemic situation with apps. The stats are unbelievably bad. Uh We're talking about rise in uh depressive episodes. Uh We're talking about undergraduates with mental ill illness. And to me, the the most horrific one is uh girls uh uh hospitalized with self-harm uh, where we have nearly three X, uh, growth, uh, through, uh, the last decade. Uh, if you click forward. Uh, so, yeah, and, uh, one of the things that we've done is, um, an initiative called B A. Uh, it's, uh, led by parents of, uh, girls athletic, uh, girls across, uh, cross country runners. And we created a place for them to, to share their feelings, to feel comforted and supported and to seek help by uh coaches and, and uh professionals. Um So we're dealing a lot with the adverse effects today of, of apps and, and uh the digital economy if you wish. Um So B I is a, is a web app. It's also possible to interact with uh you know, mobile phone and it's shown major effects in, in terms of supporting these girls. Um So the, the whole topic of uh mobile phone use has been very much in the news lately. Uh I'm sure you're familiar with the Australian initiative to ban social app under 16 uh in the USA lot of counties and, and school districts actually uh uh banned them and we are actually working on, on really cutting edge uh different technology solution that would allow us to uh really curtail this phenomena. Uh These mobile phones are just too good and too addictive. It's like sugar, you, you need to be off it. Some of it is good, but beyond that, it's really a problem. Um move on to the next part, I say, like my old high school also just banned mobile phones on campus. Um a policy change that's done surprisingly well according to them. Um But your next project, not among the, not among the, the students, I'm sure they, they say they're fine with it. Um But moving on to the next um project kind of returning again to the idea of adorable robots. Um Yeah. So, you know, part of my mission if you wish is to really try to bridge the gaps between uh uh you know, technology and humans. And part of that is doing experiments. So we created this initiative called Alto. We actually created um robots and created a seminar, a place where the design community in San Francisco came to our studio, we had a debate with panels of experts and there were people who were more into the utilitarian values of robots and some more for the emotional we had a debate. Uh We had actually votes and a lot of people uh swapped their ideas about the topic we intentionally brought to posing objects if you wish. Um And if you click forward, uh the, the taller one is called brute and it's uh semi functional. Uh it has some utility and the little guy Iggy uh is a completely uh emotional support um pet if you wish and it's uh click forward and it's very cute and very lovable and has uh cute behaviors and the way it actually, uh, moves and ask for attention and really has no purpose other than being, uh, your friend or your, uh, pet. So, uh, by the way, all these are approved by engineering and, and we know how to make them and so on. Um, brute, on the other side is, um, obsessed with cleaning your home. Uh, brute will run around and click forward and, and, you know, next month too, uh brute is basically picking up litter and uh it runs around and pick up uh you know, thrown objects and bring them to uh a place where they could actually be stored. So, very interesting debate, but experimentation is very, very important nowadays, uh how we interact with artificial beings uh is, is something that we're not used to. And one of the conclusions we had there, you know, the acronym A I has been overused, I think, but generally, uh maybe we should start thinking about it in terms of approachable intelligence rather than quote unquote artificial intelligence. I mean, what do you think? I mean, there has been a lot of social debate about artificial intelligence about maybe replacing people. I mean, what do you think are some of the root causes of that unease? And how would you account for that as a designer? I think there is a major ramification for humans on, on, on, on uh political, business, economic uh personal levels. But I think there is another fundamental element that we tend to underestimate for 23 million years. We were the smartest, smartest kids in the class. We were the only really smart creature around us. And finally, we are about to meet other creatures that are just as smart, if not smarter than us. And it's a psychological crisis. So how do you approach a robot? How do you know whether the robot is going to pass next to you or pass through you? So we are dealing with this level of uh you know, subliminal communications that are so clear to us as humans. But when these things start roaming around, we don't have that language yet. So I think there is a crisis there. Um So I want to move on to the last product you're gonna show for us, you know, and to kind of lead to this new Deal design. One of the most famous works was was the fitbit that helped kind of kick off the whole trend in wearables and health tech and fitness tech and everything that you're working in that space again. Now, um tell us some more about, about this next project. So if I was a company, we help getting off the ground, we obviously designed a device. It's an AED, it's the life device that allows allows people that have an incident of cardiac arrest or whatever, stay alive and so on. Many times, it's actually hidden in public spaces or in workplaces. So one of the main things they wanted to do is to make it a consumer product that everyone has. And what we added to that is the ability to share it online and become part of the first responding system. So the location of the device is clear and to some degree, the ability or the will of the people who own it to to to run towards that. So uh the big thing here is really to create uh this uh network device that has a connection of the emergency incident and, and the device itself and obviously the social will of somebody to run across the street and save a neighbor. And I believe there we go. Yeah, that's a pretty poignant poignant movie. 911. What is your emergency? Uh My wife, I've been shaking her but she's not moving. I don't think she's breathing. Ok. Is she awake? She's not responding. What do I do? Ok. My partner sent back an ambulance to you and I'm gonna work on getting an A Ed to your location. I'm gonna give you some instructions for CPR. Ok. Ok. Cardiac, bye bye. Cardiac arrest nearby. Yeah. Ok. I'm located in a Ed. I have one nearby. It's on the quad to you where you hurry. Ok. It looks like the A CD is getting close. Can you go to your front door and need them? Ok. Yeah, delivering shock is 321. The device now is FDA approved. So it's already sold as an FDA approved. But I mean, so, so the, but, but, but I guess you, it really has been successful in kind of building like a community of people who are willing to kind of be good Samaritans and step out and respond to a cardiac arrest happening nearby. Uh Yeah, I think the they now have a lot of communities that uh joined and there's always as you see a connection between the first responders, the 911 and people who owns these and that's part of the, the, the system quote unquote. And by the way, I mean, at the beginning, there was a fallback. The fallback was a traditional A ed uh sale cycle, you know, you own it because you uh you want to have one. But uh they found out that people actually are good and are willing to share and are willing to go on the system. So, so that's a, that's a good thing. Um We have time for kind of a few more questions. Um If anyone in the audience has a thought they'd like to share, I'd like to ask, please raise your hand now. But before we do that, I mean, so how do you see design kind of progressing over the next few years? I mean, as there continues to be the social unease about, about tech kind of how do you see, how do you see design changing to account for that. So I think um part of the problems we've had and I think Robert touched on it is that designers were relegated to some degree to more tactical uh jobs. I think designers really definitely need to raise their heads and, and, and play a bigger role in uh system and product thinking and to some degree counter the industry, counter the industry counter the, the, the, the, the money folks, the, the tech folks and all that and, and create alternatives that are thoughtful that are uh uh making good business, but also making better society. So that's something that I think is very, very important. Uh a part of it also, I got to say that it's even stylistically. I mean, we've been through a long period of time that people were into minimalism. I'm not sure minimalism worked that well. Today when we're talking about uh interaction with uh artificial intelligence, maybe we need to be over communicative and you see that a little bit in these designs. So then what would your advice be to, to an up and coming designer that now has to work in this space? I mean, how would you encourage them to not think about the role quite so tactically? How would you encourage them to, to design a way that heads off a social backlash? Is it really just acute? The design? Is that enough? But how would you advise younger designers to think about this problem? That's a great question. I think uh there is a lot of uh complacency to some degree in design community and in the tech and business community. I think designers to some degree needs to take the role of the no bullshit common sense people that are somewhat contrarian, they do it with civility, they do that with thoughtfulness, but they bring ideas that are challenging convention and this is what I would advise. Every young designer. Don't lose this edge, keep it sharp. Keep being contrarian, don't fear countering commonplace thinking. Um Very, very quick final question just for me personally, um is, is, is the brute robot available for me? My house is a mess after me would actually be very helpful. Well, we had a hidden thought, somebody would actually take it and make it happen. Uh you know, uh not in the near future, but I think the concept, for instance, we're talking about home robotics. We are dealing with this issue of maybe robots didn't, shouldn't do too many things, you know, just tell me where are my keys. Alright, so that's enough. All right, with that, with that fresh take on design and design and tech. I want to thank God so much for joining us today and sharing what he's working on. Thank you very much. Thank you guys.

Robert Brunner, Founder & Creative Director, Ammunition;  Lead Designer for Beats by Dre, In (virtual) conversation with Clay Chandler, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2024: The Elements That Make Design Great

Ann Morrow Johnson, Global Entertainment Leader, Design Director, Gensler, Andrew Lazarow, Studio Leader, The LAB at Rockwell Group, Alexandre Simionescu, Founder and CEO, Float4 Moderator: Tony Chambers, Co-chair, Brainstorm Design; Founder and Creative Director, Studio TC & Friends 

Brainstorm Design 2024: Experiments in Experience

Ann Morrow Johnson, Gensler, Andrew Lazarow, The LAB at Rockwell Group, Alexandre Simionescu, Float4, Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends 

Elizabeth Brink, co-CEO, Gensler, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Designing What’s Next

Bob Dennis, Senior Director of Creative Studio & Resort Development, Universal Beijing Resort, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Designing Memories

Bob Dennis, Senior Director of Creative Studio & Resort Development, Universal Beijing Resort, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia FORTUNE  

So I thought there would be a fireplace. Uh Fortune invited me to a fireside chat. So I thought there would be a fireplace. But we brought is, is how is is wordplay part of your tool kit for memorable experiences. Yeah, it's immersion. Don't you feel cozy? So we're, we're going to get into your thoughts on park design, how to build immersive experiences, how to leverage emotions. But I have to ask, I'm a fervent player of video games. What was it like for Universal to work with Nintendo? Oh Amazing. First of all, Miyamoto. So is a genius and uh it's a learning curve for both of us. Uh because in the world of video games, it's digital and our world is physical with steel and concrete. Um So it's a learning curve on both sides but an amazing partnership. So, so as mentioned, you know, you've worked in this space for over 30 years. I believe your first gig was working for a San Rio theme park back in 1988. How has theme park design changed over the decades? Well, I'm old. So um when we were designing theme parks back in the eighties we didn't have any computers, we didn't have computer assisted design. It was all done with a pencil and then ink and then of course you pulled your prints. Um But everything was exhibition then and the industry has changed so much that now it's immersion. Um And we're getting better and better at that, but we've been doing immersion since before the term was even coined. So, I mean, let's split at that. I mean, given your long experience kind of working with immersive experiences, you know, before, was a buzzword that people used. You know, how do you actually create such an immersive memorable experience? What's your toolkit? And I believe we have some slides, maybe even some audience engagement a little bit as we go through this. So I think the table stakes because of where we are, it's a good reference. The table stakes are excellent storytelling and of course, um you'll hear this often today. Um visual stimulation, sensory input. So you need a, you need a beautiful picture, but you also need a logical story that the guests can connect to and find their place in what it is that you're trying to present. So that's cable stakes and where you have to go further is you have to, you want people to connect to the story you have and most people forget about emotion. So every memorable experience can be done by senses here in Macau, you get a sense of awe, a sense of grandeur. But what's missing to make it an episodal autobiographical memory is emotion. So the best connection is always made through emotions and often people confuse feelings with emotions. So there's a million colors and everything that we do happens here, it happens inside the brain, regardless of how good your design is or how grand your experience is, all of it has to be encoded so that we have an experience without the memory. What's the point? Right? So most people don't realize that with three colors, you can make a million, a million different colors with eight basic emotions. You can also make a million different feelings. And it's very important to understand the difference between emotions and feelings. OK? Can you guys guess what this emotion is? We don't need mics, you can just yell it out just fine play along, right? So this is obviously joy. I created these images um to trick you in a minute. Um But yeah, these are facial expressions uh that evoke that particular chemistry happening in your limbic system. So you understand joy, the opposite of joy. Of course, the next one, sadness, right? And after sadness, I'll, I'll see if you can guess this one. This is the trick. Most of you are thinking love, however, love is not an emotion. Love is a feeling that is a combination of several emotions. It could be joy, sadness, disgust, right? And um these all come together in a symphony inside our brain that we equate with the feeling of love. So it's trust, trust is the emotion. This one is a good one discussed, right? This is baked into our limbic system for your survival. Um And so memories that are formed along with this emotion are deeply encoded anger when we have a perceived wrong. Um These also are strongly recorded, not as moments but as experiences. So they're, they're like little videos instead of a snapshot. If somebody makes you afraid, you will retell this experience over and over again in great detail. OK? Anybody anger, right? Same process. So every oh they made me so mad and then they'll tell you every little detail because it's been recorded as an autobiographical memory. It was, it was an experience. OK? This one, this one, Alfred Hitchcock was a master at this. We use it often too um anticipation. And then finally, uh this is where you take your redirect. So if you use the emotion of anticipation, the brain starts creating all kinds of scenarios on its own and it engages deeply in the frontal cortex. And what this does is creates more engagement and people are doing their own self reflection. And then of course, you do the redirect, you take them into a way that they did not expect the outcome to be and we get surprised. So we have these eight emotions then how are you kind of putting them all together? And leverage them into a memorable experience. I mean, some of these emotions make sense for a theme park setting, joy, surprise anticipation, even fear, some feel a little bit, you know, maybe not quite as easy to put into an entertainment setting like discussed. So how are you leveraging all of these emotions together to kind of tell a story in the real world? It's a good point. So you don't want to manipulate people and you don't want to use uh emotions as trickery. So it has to be authentic. And so I think most designers forget about engineering those emotions in putting together a recipe or a symphony that causes crescendos and date crescendos. And that, that working together engages the person into a story and they, they're all useful, but some, we use more than others, obviously joy. Um There's a great one, anticipation. We try to stay away from fear and disgust, but they're used, we, we do use them. Um I want you to dive a bit deeper about kind of adapting these ideas, you know, a lot of universal zone properties, the properties of your partners like Warner for Harry Potter or Nintendo. These are things that exist on the page or on the screen. They don't exist in the real world. You know, as much as some of us would love magic to exist in the real world. It, it it doesn't. But how do you take these things that only exist? You know, in fiction basically and make them work as a real world experience. So this is why I'm losing my hair. Um So our, our creatives um Miyamoto Song JK Rowling, um They're amazing at creating worlds in print or production designers like Stuart Craig for film and they can pretty much create anything that they can imagine. So our job is to take that world and those stories and connect our guests to those characters. But we have to do it with steel and concrete building codes, safety requirements, throughput, operability. Um Basically, we shouldn't do anything because it's almost impossible. And yet we have many parts around the world that do just that. So um it, it's very difficult to, to translate, but we're very fortunate because we work with our IP partners and the films are there, we only get three or four minutes to, to kind of get people through that experience. Um And so we do a lot of callbacks, a lot of bringing up things that they saw or remembered in the film. And we have to do that in a way they can touch it. So a gag has to work every time, every day for years, not just to catch it, capture it on film. So I would say we use all the sciences um and all the arts and that our attractions are some of the most sophisticated machines there are. And I think that when you go to a theme Park. We don't want you to know that we try to keep that secret, but it's a fact. Um I want to stick on this film point for a second and how it connects particularly to one memory I have of going to Universal Studios, Japan when I was a very small child. I still remember seeing the Water World Exhibit for those who don't know. Water World is a 1995 film starring Kevin Costner. Um I'll say reactions to the film were mixed and being charitable. Um But I dare say the attraction is more, is, is, is more famous than the film at this point. Um It's in, it's in many of um universal parks. Um And so kind of why do you think this attraction in particular is so popular? And how does it fit in your philosophy for immersion and experience? We actually have some video that you can have talked for a bit first. It's a very good example. So the film mixed reviews on the film II, I don't think it was a blockbuster. Um But we were able to take uh from that film and use the emotions that are created by it and do a stunt spectacular. So not only was it visual, which is great and great sound and great lighting and great special effects, but everything is real. We don't use projections, there's real flames, we set the entire lagoon on fire and you will feel the heat from that and you will get wet. Um But in the story itself, we also engage many of the emotions, you may be angry at the villain. Um You feel some joy. So I think that the theme park experience in this example um has outlived the film and we're gonna show a little bit of it what actually happens on screen. Um So I want to talk about kind of another stakeholder in this discussion. We've talked about designers universal, we've talked about it partners, but there's also the fans um these are worlds with uh I'm going to call them very devoted fan bases, very passionate fan bases. That's true of Harry Potter. It's true of Nintendo, it's true of your um your peers at Disney, you have to work in Star Wars. Fans are passionate, they are also a little nuts. Um And so how do you kind of design these experiences in a way to kind of give fans what they want to make it memorable for them, but also managing expectations and managing it for those who maybe haven't read every single book a dozen times. So I think as designers, we often get caught up in our own story and um we, we wanna engage our visitors to remember what they want to experience. So at Universal, we really believe our guests are co creators. We engage often and constantly with those, not just the deep fans, but with uh the people that may not be deep fans, it's very important to get that feedback so that you're telling the story that they can get, that you're telling the story that they want to experience and that you don't get too stuck in what you want. Um So it has to be more objective, a little less subjective and constantly engaging with the feedback from the fans and we love hearing from them. Um And you're right, some of them are a little crazy, but we love that kind of crazy. Um You know, just kind of, it's gonna bring a kind of more examples of rides we've worked on. I mean, what's maybe another one of these exciting rides that you've worked on that really kind of shows your philosophy on, on designing immersive and memorable experiences. So the the awards are, are Industry's Oscars and we received it last year for Jurassic World Adventure. You all have to come to Beijing. That's the only place that attraction exists right now and that I believe really checks all the boxes on visual stimulation, um experiential design, but more importantly, emotion. So I remember when we opened, uh there was a 12 year old boy that was a guest of a friend of mine. And after going on that attraction, he asked me quite seriously, uh what do we feed our dinosaurs, right? So, so that type of sense, the suspension of disbelief um can only be found in, in, in the major players in this and that was why that is my favorite. I'm going to have to find an excuse to go find a story to write about it and then get work to expense it. Um But thank you Bob for, for walking us through the toolkit on how you build immersive experiences at universal. We're going to take a short break right now. Please help yourself to coffee, which will be served right outside the ballroom. Don't forget to pick up a copy of Gensler's design forecast 2025 report available at the desk on a first come first serve basis. So grab your copy. Now we'll meet back here for our next conversation promptly at 1045. When we come back, we'll hear from two of Silicon Valley's leading industrial designers and a panel of accomplished design leaders on customer experience. We'll see you back here soon.

Brainstorm Design 2024

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design for Good

Latest video

Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills, Ben Sheppard, co-founder and Chair, Design for Good , Moderator: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Videos (19 videos)

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design for Good

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Brainstorm Design 2024: Shocked!

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Brainstorm Design 2024: ‘Biomorphic Urbanism’ and Cities of the Future

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Brainstorm Design 2024: Design In Focus - Designing For Equity, Access & Justice

Brainstorm Design 2024: ‘Social Rewilding’

Brainstorm Design 2024: Fat Chance

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design For Transformative Spaces

Brainstorm Design 2024: Ephemeral Tech

Brainstorm Design 2024: The Customer Connection

Brainstorm Design 2024: Androids and Their Connection to Electric Art

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design At Scale

Brainstorm Design 2024: Tech For A Better Tomorrow

Brainstorm Design 2024: The Elements That Make Design Great

Brainstorm Design 2024: Experiments in Experience

Brainstorm Design 2024: Designing What’s Next

Brainstorm Design 2024: Designing Memories

Brainstorm Design 2024

Brainstorm Design 2024: Design for Good

Latest video

Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills, Ben Sheppard, co-founder and Chair, Design for Good , Moderator: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Videos (19 videos)

Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills, Ben Sheppard, co-founder and Chair, Design for Good , Moderator: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends