Brainstorm Design 2025

A partner at a renowned international architecture firm collaborates with a developer of advanced construction technologies to use 3D printing for buildings, creating designs that meld ancient and future and making housing not only affordable but highly customizable and personalized. With a project for NASA to provide construction on the moon, their goals are literally out of this world!

Otherworldly Architecture

Conferences

A multidisciplinary designer & innovation executive shares strategies for leaning into uncertain times and embracing ambiguity to unlock innovation and new learning.

A Non-Linear Approach to Coping with Chaos

So, while Yan speaks for the trees, our next presenter invites us to enter a different type of forest, the forest of ambiguity. Kevin Bethune calls himself a multidisciplinary misfit. Good name. His career has taken a few zigs and a few zags. Starting as a nuclear power mechanical engineer. To producing sneakers for Nike, which then led him to invest in a design degree. Now he's a design executive and an innovation advisor. He's an author and a TV presenter. To cope with chaos, he shares a non-linear approach that leans into uncertainty in order to unlock learning and innovation. Please join me in welcoming Kevin Bethune. Uncertainty. We're all feeling it. We're all navigating choppy waters, with the questioning what to secure, what to throw overboard. And how to stay the course. I want to share some critical perspectives with you on how we can build our creative intuition to navigate the chaos. Call it nonlinearity off the back of my second book which launched earlier this year, nonlinear Navigating Design with Curiosity and conviction. But before I dive in, Let's just first take a beat. And recognize that no matter the policy, No matter the business, the brand, the experience, even the built environment. Things are the way they are by design. They were informed by someone, right, wrong or indifferent, and as we think about what's next and who shapes what's next, who's at that table absolutely matters. And if you're familiar with any of my work or writings, I'm a big proponent of multidisciplinary collaboration. And the accelerating power that diversity can bring to innovation. But when I mention diversity, I'm very careful to say that I can only speak for me. We're all intersectional. As a black man who's navigated corporate America through some unique multidisciplinary leaps, I can understand what marginalization feels like, especially when it's feedback that's of a subjective place. As a male when I enter an executive arena, and I'm cognizant of how my voice carries when I enter the room. I have to be cognizant of the privilege that I have when my voice is given the benefit of the doubt compared to my peers of other genders. So when we think about teaming and teaming evolution in that respect. The big but here is that that's not enough. The teaming isn't enough. We have to appreciate. Actually, how we navigate the work itself, how we navigate is important because when it comes to innovation, To create anything new and novel, we have to be prepared to do things differently. So I want to provide a little bit of context in terms of where these perspectives are coming from. By sharing a little bit of my lived experience personally and professionally. I like to say that I found design mid-career and design found me. But I'm very thankful for the timing, the way the world has evolved. So I started my career as a mechanical engineer in the nuclear power generation industry. It's where I cut my teeth on product, learn how to work with high performing teams. Fast forward, a curiosity for business crept in, led to getting an MBA. And I told myself I want to join a company that has not only a strategy and technical aspects but also creativity as well. So the MBA led me to Nike Inc. so very thankful to start there. I started in a business planning capacity, but the product person within, I quickly networked my way over to the to the global footwear product engine of Nike. And that's when I encountered professional design in practice for the first time in my career, and I just started leaning into that, asking questions. Questions led to opportunities to actually moonlight on the side and learn how to design shoes for a couple of categories that were willing to give me a shot. Very thankful for that experience. But I also noticed the world outside of Nike was changing to appreciate this notion of multidisciplinary convergence. And a few shoe projects were great, but it didn't necessarily answer my creative foundation, so I made the difficult decision to leave Nike and in more grad schooling to solidify my creative foundation. And in doing so, I've been able to serve as a creative co-founder to help build design and innovation capabilities and spaces that hadn't previously appreciated the power of creative problem solving. And I had a chance to share the learning, the lessons learned on different platforms in terms of what it was like to really reimagine design and stand it up in those spaces. That led to the genesis of the practice that I run today in dreams, design, and life. So we work hard to bring disparate disciplines around the table to problem solve the future in a uniquely different ways together, and then we leverage the depth of design craft to ensure that the affordances that we're working on are actually coherent and resonant against the ecologies and futures that we're uncovering together as a team. Whether it's consumer electronics in the space of dynamic crypto markets to bridging and marrying deep science and human centered behavior change in the realm of biotech and making sure that we're working on ecologies that actually meet people where they are and in this case providing members of this platform an affordance that allows them a superior diagnostic of what's happening in their health and wellness based on the science in the human breath. And helping a multitude of different businesses of all shapes and sizes to unlock innovation opportunities strategically leveraging design in the right way. So this leads to this notion of a nonlinear approach. What do I mean by that? Well, hopefully from those anecdotes, you realize how much of a fervent believer I am in the power of this collaboration and bringing disciplines together. I believe the collaboration is the currency that informs future innovation. And the question becomes What, what happens from that collaboration? And we have to be cognizant of every design and business decision from that as it cascades onto the broader ecology. So beyond the business and customer concern, what are the impacts of those decisions on sustainability, data ethics, privacy, and the like, and that's not enough. We have to think about the role societal imbalance has played in a lot of the target audiences that we profess to serve. And societal imbalance is a difficult one, and for me it's personal. Looping back to the anecdote I shared about diversity, the next image I'm about to share is a difficult one for my own family's lived experience and origin story. It's a picture of my mother when she was 2 years old being held by my late grandmother. This shot made the newspaper at that time. The family had just returned home from church one Sunday morning to have found their home had been burned to the ground by white supremacist aggression in the area in which they were living. Overt assault on humanity, absolutely. But behind the scenes there were a lot of covert forces at play and that there are a lot of commercial and government forces trying to intimidate black land landowning families from from their properties to make way for local infrastructure like highways and you hear about redlining and these kind of things. Well, this is just one anecdote of many anecdotes of my family origin story. So again we have to be brave about how we Induce a collaboration model that unravels these variables is really important. And the question becomes if we team this way, what does it give us the ability to do? In my view, we can see the future I'm holding up a looking glass, looking at the distant time horizon. Together we can see the future through different vantage points. We can see the future through the lens of people and really interrogating needs and value criteria. We can see it through industry and really just questioning some of the foundational assumptions of how an industry is supposed to behave and really interrogating those assumptions and then bringing a whole host of trends and exemplars to inspire the art of what's possible. Now if I take that lens and move it to the side along the axis of time, The cool thing is, as designers we can play games and allow the paradigms, the ebb and flow of different trends and paradigms as they intersect over time. We can interrogate and imagine a multitude of different future scenarios. So imagine getting to design future contexts before we even think about solutions. Really exciting stuff to be able to diverge that way. And when we do this, we're priming our teams to be able to make natural sparks and connections across this diversity of observations, data points, and inspirations that we uncover in that, and we can think of new stories and systems that capture the imagination and flow that into any product creation and innovation process or method. And here I'm showing a rubric that's very familiar to a lot of us, the double diamond, one of many. And sometimes I cringe a little bit at the simplicity of such frameworks because in the face of complexity, they can be perceived to be inadequate. Things can fall down. And what I'm arguing for is for us to really appreciate the nuances that go beyond the simple framework because reality is chaotic, complexity is real. And despite everyone's good intention, If I apply a method on this project, I expect it to work on the next 10 projects the same way, and it doesn't necessarily work that way, and we get formulaic when things happen to work the first time on the next project on the line. And when we do that, we beat risk out of the approach. So instead I'm arguing for this notion of a forest of ambiguity, literally, and I, and I drew a map in my second book, um. So no matter where we are in that forest, and this is just a representation of the landscape. No matter where I am, I can establish a position and say I'm going to take a step, any step, and appreciate the choices that I have in the form of what I'm characterizing as a vector and magnitude of effort in a given direction, and I have many choices in terms of what I can do at that moment. I can take stock in what I know. I can take stock in what I don't know. I can say, hey, what can I make? I'm a designer. I can make, I can always make something and it doesn't have to be a solution. I can offer a speculation or a probe to ask deeper questions. And as I move through that forest, what do I stand to learn? And insights and opportunities can guide my way as I move along. Oftentimes we hear at the start of a project, what does the data say? And I'm not here to scoff at data, data can be helpful. We need boundary conditions and some of those initial vectors might be involve gathering the data that's at our fingertips to characterize where we should play and to market where we should play in the landscape versus where we maybe shouldn't play and potentially waste time. In my experience, many projects are often missing the thicker substance next to the complimentary notion of conclusive data that we may already have. The thick data. Is the attitudes, the behaviors, the idiosyncrasies, the cultural norms, the things that make us human, and it takes spending a considerably larger amount of time with a limited subset of people to get after that thick stuff. And again it can run and complement with the conclusive or quantified data that we have from statistically significant audience sizes of people. We can dig for the substance and we do that. This next rubric is based on the great work of Liz Sanders and Peter Stappers. It's just mapping the research landscape to get us to appreciate that we have choices. When it comes to qualitative insight as we look for it and uncover it, oftentimes companies might resort to focus groups and one on one interviews with their target audiences, but we need to consider the multitude of different investigative approaches that come from different mindsets where there's design led, expert led, research led, and the like. There's a full litany of choices that we have at our disposal to interrogate how what people are actually doing, how our target audience is actually feeling, thinking, and who they actually self-prescribe themselves to be in any given context. And so if I were to ask this person referencing the biotech example, if I were to reference, hey, you know, tell me about your relationship with health and wellness in your life, that's such an open-ended question. She might have a hard time actually engaging that question. But instead if I pick a particular technique and said, hey, I want you to draw me a picture of your relationship with health and wellness over the course of your life, through your life journey, through the ebbs and flows and inflection points, draw me a picture for 10 minutes, we come back together and we talk about it, we discuss it. Just evoking her muscle memory, anchoring and visuals, we can have a conversation that exposes and uncovers a litany of latent insights and nuances that we can better appreciate. Quan is the framing vehicle, qualitative insight is the clay, and we can start shaping that substance through rigorous design ideation and get somewhere through that forest and take the different vectors where they take us along that journey. So a few final thoughts as I wrap up. Change is hard. Non-linear change is even harder. And we could attempt to dimensionalize it. This 2 by 2 is just a rough characterization. On the vertical axis is sort of the observable behavior that we feel from teams, individuals and organizations. In the midst of change, people are either reacting, they're on their heels, they're in a defensive posture, or there's others that are actually playing some offense and they're garnering their agency and getting ahead of the change. On the horizontal axis is the nature of change itself. Sometimes change is predictable, linear, or it might be runaway beyond our comprehension, non-linear, and we can just add some qualifiers to each of these quadrants. In the predictable defensive quadrant we might see risk aversion. Risk is bad. Failure is bad, gatekeeping, protecting the status quo, zero-sum thinking. As we move to the right, change gets harder. He in the sand behavior, populism. Perhaps people taking advantage of the confusion with nefarious agendas. Generative AI in this context might skew to the doom and gloom narratives that are problematic. As we move up to the productive offensive side on predictable change, there might be an appreciation of the balance between risk and reward. Systems thinking, people are going to appreciate the macro and micro. We might be able to crack through the glass ceiling in some ways to create opportunities for change. But what I get most excited about is the upper right hand quadrant, this notion of Doubling down on nonlinearity, encouraging multidisciplinary collaboration, celebrating diversity, we can actually expand the playing field. We can use our creativity to address the multitudes, not just the one. We can have a growth mindset. We can embrace failure, generative AI in this respect. We can get excited about how AI could amplify our creativity. And we can be better attuned to culture. So that's the executive mindset that I hope we all carry forward in our work moving forward. So I just want to encourage each of us to stay curious in our work, divide convention where you see it, and to be nonlinear. Thank you.

Beneath every visible city lies another one made of roots, rivers, soils, breezes, and microbial worlds — a restless ecology that shapes the urban realm as profoundly as any human plan. A former landscape artist, now working with AI research labs, invites us to look at this hidden metropolis with new eyes and explore how intelligent tools can help surface the needs and rhythms of non-human actors: trees that regulate microclimates, waterways that remember old paths, soils that hold the city together grain by grain. What new forms of governance and design become possible when we learn to listen to these quieter voices — and allow the invisible city to speak?

Invisible Cities

Beneath every visible city lies an invisible one made of roots, rivers, soils, a restless ecology that profoundly affects the urban realm. Yet our planning and policy frameworks remain very human centric. Former landscape architect Jan Bunge now works with AI. Research labs that invite us to look at this hidden metropolis with new eyes and explore how intelligent tools can help surface the needs and rhythms of nonhuman actors, giving them a voice in design and governance. He'll be in conversation with Brainstorm Design co-chair Tony Chambers. Thank you, Alan Welcome, Jan. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. What a great day it's been so far, and thank you again, Jan for joining us for the 2nd time at Brainstorm Design here in Macau. So today, We've heard a lot about the importance of human centered design. I'm quite right too. However, Jan thinks we should be thinking beyond this. We should be thinking more about multi-species centered design. So we'll dig into that in a moment. First, we're gonna have a quick career. Run through and life run through of Jan so far. So your beginnings which have informed you very well, very hippie commune upbringing in Berlin and in New York. This is young Yan with his pet pig, and a quick career run through, hippie commune. Worked as a landscape architect. Into urban design. Communication And then most significantly, and when we talked last time, a pioneer of virtual experienced twins with squint opera. And there's 2 projects we're going to look at here, which you, if you could explain to us, which are very significant, and many people will have heard of. So Scre Opera has the beautiful task of communicating super large projects in the built environment to non-technical people, and the way we do that is through immersive experiences where we try for you to have an experience of how things would look and feel like. This one was the Toyota for the launch of Toyota Wolver City, um. A couple of years back and uh from, from this kind of setup, we went into uh representing everything in game engines, very similar to what we saw before. So the next one is actually um simulated in unreal Game engine where you have the opportunity to dynamically go anywhere you want, but secondly, you can also switch between different options. Again, this is always about allowing non-technical people to get an idea of how things will look and feel like. And this one was a huge project in Neon, Saudi Arabia. Yeah, so basically opera simulates anyone who wants to build a new city, but Uh, you know, it's at a very early stages, um, and there's a lot of non-technical people involved who have to make important decisions. This is when, you know, you, you call them and they help you simulate those complex future realities. And then from that, how many many years working in this area and really being a pioneer, squint opera were doing the largest and most impactful work with virtual experienced twins, and your experience working with virtual experience twins and AI. So it led you to question the data that is input and then what actually ultimately drives AI and that's what's brought you back. To your first love and first work, landscape, architecture and design, and gardening. Yeah, to explain, I think in a funny way design data has become the frontier of design today, um, but As a landscape architect, I often think about gardens and if you go back in time and you look at early depictions of Persian gardens or the way we thought about the Garden of Eden or Chinese gardens, you'll see that they are always walled gardens, and this had a lot to do with our perception at the time, which was that the world around us, the nature Around us was actually dangerous, often life threatening, and so what we did was we cut out a little piece, built a wall around, and then within that little piece of man-made landscape, we forced trees to grow in squares and we we straightened our rivers and then we ended up with this. So we tried to tame nature and nature. We tried to control a complex system that we didn't fully understand. And Then we talk about natural catastrophes, but when we see floods like that, but what actually happens in reality is that the river is just remembering where it used to flow. Um, rivers have always meandered. This is a map of how the Mississippi River, which areas it used to occupy in the past. So you could say the river is just remembering where it used to go and it was our lack of understanding of this complex system. That led to those human catastrophes. So they're not natural disasters, they're human made. They're definitely manmade. So now at this moment in time when you know, we see all the advances in machine learning and AI, my hope is that for the very first time in human history, we can actually dare to look over the wall of our walled garden and try to Understand and at least see and perceive reality for what it is as a very complex, interdependent, interconnected, constantly changing dynamic reality. And if there are two things that I learned over the last couple of years as a designer, The reason why I got obsessed with data and what we put into those machines is that by definition, the way they work is based on the idea of a recursive learning loop. So any technology we ever invented before is static in the sense that a book will not change depending on how you read it. Here it's really whatever we put into it gets reinforced over and over again. So it's important to figure out what we put in and the second thing. It's something we have always known that the tools that we make and use actually shape us. Now we are dealing with a tool that is constantly reshaping itself as it shapes us. So again, I feel one of the most important frontiers as a designer is to really understand all the underlying infrastructure, all the underlying logic of how these machines work in order to use them in the best possible way for us. And you feel we are still living in anachronistically in a sense, yeah, still in the Gutenberg world. We all, uh, this is the only world we know actually. If you think about all our processes and systems, um, you know, there's hard borders, there are linear, it's all about being able to control and predict, but the reality is that even though we are still living in the Gutenberg world. The AI world is upon us and there is no way back and you know the simple way of looking at this is that. This AI world is the complete opposite of what we are today. So we're moving from linear to network systems, from static to dynamic, from specialized to integrated, from mechanical to organic, and in the end from control to emergence. And so this is not a little adjustment 10% different here or there. This is a fundamental by emergence you mean an unpredictable, unpredictable and constantly changing and evolving in time. So The other thing working a lot in stimulation, uh, I also came to believe that The intelligence or our power is really not about prediction, but it is very much about our capacity to perceive. I think the beautiful opportunity that we have is to use this technology to see more and that is really, you know, at this moment in time, too often people have a very complex problem and a very big question, and then they want to boil it down to one single answer. I think we should use the machine the other way around, you know, it should talk to us about the edges that we heard earlier about, you know, show me the things I didn't think about, show me the things I didn't know, yeah. Um, you know, both these elements are, you know, AI supported real-time design tools on the right. This is a tool where in real time the designer can stimulate environmental impact, whether it is heat gain or wind. This used to be. impossible to do in real time because those simulations, those calculations would take even 2 years ago, uh, a day to, to render. And so today, um, through the use of AI by training AI and understanding how those Complex systems actually work. We have the ability to simulate it in real time and give real-time feedback to the designer and the left is the simulation of wind, and by physicalizing the wind in the 3D model, you get a very different idea of what you're dealing with. So personally, I'm most obsessed with the question of, you know, how can we move from Building systems and tools and processes for human-centric design and how can we expand them to acknowledge that we are actually living in a multi-species reality. I feel like a lot of the problems that we have today is because we, we thought we understood enough. To take action and to manipulate, but by not knowing or not seeing the fringes or the site or the holistic picture, we ended up where we are today. So really how can we give agency to nonhuman entities that help us design and govern our cities better and in specific, specifically one of the non-humans that you are supporting and Highlighting its importance is trees. So this is a research project that started 6 years ago, uh, it's called Trees as Infrastructure, and it was actually started by a bunch of economists at Dark Matter Labs together with Lucid Minds, the AI research lab in Amsterdam, and they had the question of how can we validate the economic impact of trees to safeguard capital investment in in cities. So, so in order to, you know, make mission critical budget decisions at a large scale, they went very deep and they started looking at all the ways in which you could measure impact or value. the obvious ones pre sequester carbon and they have an impact on biodiversity which translates into carbon credits or biodiversity credits. But they also looked into aspects of human health, meaning reduction in temperature or improvement of air quality, as well as resilience related issues like how do the trees enhance the soil capacity to absorb water in a stormwater event, for example. Interestingly driven by economists. They're all driven by economists because cities have to decide. When they are planting trees, you know, which will give them the best uh impact. So, so everything today obviously needs to be validated and analyzed properly. So yeah, this is driven or started through an economic lens and uh it has been deployed in many cities, so uh in in Europe in the next slide you see a bunch of um uh examples, um, and, and uh if you want to validate something. That complex, then you really need to have scientific rigor and which means that all the underlying assumptions of this platform are actually peer reviewed and publicized so everyone can see if you agree with the core logic of the simulation and also the core algorithms that determine things like the species specific tree grows are accessible. I think it's a very important point. And if we talk about managing risk and liability, we need visibility. And so also I am also like you heard from Ben, very much of the opinion that you know the only way to do that is to open up this information and really open source as much as possible. And girls, tell us a little more about. So green unified systems started with trees, but the way the simulation is built is that it obviously has to take into account the whole ecosystem. So we talk to each other and they, so not only the trees talk to each other, so you need to represent all of those individually, but also they relate to the soil. So there's a module where you're simulating the soil, then there's the animals and then there's the climate and so green unified system is really designed to expand beyond the trees and that's what I'm currently working on is, is to explore how we can reach a point where we can actually start thinking about a tool that can go beyond those trees all encompassing looking at the whole ecosystem. So I don't have a great working on. I don't have a great name for it yet. So it's called Audoy. Uh, for the simple fact that this is a tool that helps you to analyze, understand, design, optimize, and implement nature-based solutions, um, and All these, uh, you know, are grounded in utilizing environmental intelligence in the design process, uh, in, in real time. So when you think about this challenge, you know, at the beginning you need something to assess assess your conditions and you want to set your goals, design different scenarios, test them virtually before you scale and then it all needs to feed back constantly into, into the model. Um, again, I feel. The real opportunity that we have today is that we can start to engage with complex systems that even 2 or 3 years ago were impossible for us to engage with um because of the just of the sheer dimension of the problem and In that sense, there is still a lot of research to do to figure out as a constant feedback loop is needed because we will never fully understand it and every model is always an abstract representation of reality. It is never the reality obviously in itself, but, but uh. I find it fascinating that today we have the technology that helps us to make sense of all this unstructured data and help us to see patterns. How we also heard earlier this morning. So designing with environmental intelligence. So it's another AI. We started with emotional intelligence this morning, but we're on to environmental intelligence. And we should be planetary gardeners because in the end, there is really no difference between the man-made world and the natural world. There is no outside of the system. Everything is connected and everything is happening in the same space. So we need to try to adopt a more holistic understanding of everything as a beautiful and very optimistic take. We're not going to neglect humans. But we are going to think more about the multi-species world we live in. This last slide is maybe the most complicated one because We do like the illusion of control. We do want to feel in control. And as we are engaging with those complex systems, we start to understand that it's impossible to control those systems in their, in their totality, and in the end, what I think we have to get used to is the idea that we are designing for emergence, designing for the unknown and therefore, you know, in a more dynamic. evolving way. It's urgent. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for giving voice to the natural world and speaking up for the trees. Thank you. Thank you.

A progress report from one of the founders of the world’s largest network of designers delivering social, environmental products and programs that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Design for Good

Design for Good was established in 2022. It's an extraordinary nonprofit alliance of leading designers and organizations dedicated to creating products and services that improve human life and address global challenges set out by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Here to give us a progress report. On design for good impact to date and the projects they've got in motion, their goals for the future, is co-founder and chair Ben Shepherd, and I want to give a special thanks to Ben because he's been a stalwart supporter of Brainstorm design over the years, helped us with lots of ideas and put us in touch with a great community of wonderful and talented designers. So Ben, take it away. Right, here we go team, back from the shortest ever coffee break, we're going to go straight into it. I'm going to take you back to 2015. In 2015, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and their hope, their aspiration was that by 2030 we would largely have addressed those goals. Well, we're now 10 years later. We've only got 5 years left to go, and it feels like a relatively few time to ask ourselves the question, how are we doing? Spoiler alert, his answer is not very well. Let's have a look though at the exact data. So out of those 17 goals, 6 are in the most severe category of being going backwards. 11 are in the 2nd most severe category and at best stagnating. And none is marked as being on track. For those of you, I see a few of you have your camera phones out. If you want a particularly depressing photo, this is the one to take team. This is the one. If you want orange and red, this is, this is as good as it gets, and there is a reason why I'm bringing this up at a design conference. It would be fair to say we're designers, the design industry only makes up 1% of the total workforce. Surely this is a problem for government, for policies to solve, but if you look at the 231 KPIs that sit behind this, more than a third are directly impacted by the products, the buildings, the services that we in this room design. Indeed, I would argue that our impact as an industry is probably only second to that of government policy. So we have to ask ourselves the question, what can we do about it? What can we do? A group of organizations came together just as Clay mentioned a few years ago to ask exactly that question and to say with a sense of humility, can we try new ways of working, new approaches, new experiments to see whether particularly the corporate and private sectors can make a measurable and lasting impact on the sustainable development goals. And as of today, that alliance now comprises over 2000 designers, engineers, and researchers across 30 countries working on over 30 projects around the world. And the way that it works is that those designers give their time for free. They gave a minimum of 5 days per year. Most give far, far more than that. We put them into teams of 5 to 10. We partner them with charities, and they work together all the way from early concept through to execution and implementation to make sure that this actually leads to real world impact. Whilst it's still early days, we have found a set of guiding principles which is proving useful to make sure that the work we do is impactful. I'm going to share 5 of them with you. All of these will be in the category of what I would call diet and exercise. These are things that we know we should do, but often we don't, and each of these is something that we've seen from our own work has to be done if design companies and design agencies and design leaders are going to have real world impact. The first, perhaps slightly counterintuitively, is that we never start with design. We always start with the development organizations being the ones who set the briefs. We then allow the designers to refine and iterate the brief, but we never start with the designers. They're there to design with, not to design for, as we heard from Monica only yesterday. The second one is that we then build cross-functional and cross company teams. We even have teams with direct competitors like Nestle and General Mills and Pepsi working together for some of these particularly difficult systemic problems, you have to have these different companies working in the same team. The third one is on training. We invest a huge amount in training with the Royal College of Art. Everyone who goes through our program is given a formal academic qualification at the end of a year of working together, and the reason we put so much money and time into training. It's not only many of us weren't taught on how to design for vulnerable communities or ecosystems, but because when they then finish their projects, they go back into some of the largest companies on Earth, bringing those skills on how to design for sustainability into products and services that reach hundreds of millions of people. The 4th 1 is on law. Now I have to be careful here. I'm married to a lawyer, so I can't be too rude about lawyers, but on this particular topic, I do think that sometimes designers think of law and IP in particular as an afterthought. In the social impact space that does not work. You have to at the outset decide that the IP is going to be open source, worldwide, irrevocable, so that when you give it to a community they can actually use it and ideally make a profit. And then finally a zealous focus on implementation and measurement. Again, if I were to point the finger at us as the design industry, many of us in this room, myself included, have at some point in our careers led a hackathon or other activity which, whilst well intentioned, didn't lead to real world impact and therefore it's important that if we're going to do things we commit to measuring an execution, not just the fun bit at the beginning. Whilst it's still early days, we are starting to see early blossoms of impact coming from these approaches, and on the screen now you'll see examples of some of the impact numbers of the projects that we've been working on together. We don't have time to cover all of these today, but what we are going to do is cover 5 to give you a taste of the work we're doing and hopefully inspire your own social innovation efforts as well. The first one we're going to touch on is wealth. Now most of us in this room will take for granted access to clean water, but over half the world this year has faced some sort of water scarcity issue. And therefore we were lucky to partner with a charity called Biome in India to create the Million Wells app. It's now available on Android and iOS and it allows people in Bengaluru in India to access clean water and find where they can drink water which is safe for them and their families around where they live. It's a data source that didn't used to exist at all. There are now, since it launched a couple of months ago, already 1400 regular users using it to access safe water, and it's particularly exciting to see what biome the charity has planned for it. They're going to take this work, not only scale it to other cities, but also start using AI on the data set to work out how they can understand the water levels and give people the access that they need. We're going to jump onto another topic now, which is menstruation. Another depressing fact to share with you on this particular afternoon is that there are still large parts of the world where young women are missing as much a month of their school every single year because of stigma they have whilst they're on their periods. We partnered with a charity called Best Foot Forward Fund in Tanzania. And together with them we decided not to take Western trading materials and push them on to Tanzania, but instead we developed with the local communities personas, messages that were culturally sensitive to them. We took them to schools across the country. We trained young men and young women together on period positivity. And over the course of the pilot we've already been able to reach over 10,000 students. There are another thousands and thousands planned for next year, and this is where the IP gets interesting as we were working with the Foot Forward fund as we were hearing from them about their experiences, we got a call from neighboring Uganda and a charity who said, Can we take those materials and take them to Uganda? And because of our IP position, the answer was an emphatic yes. They could take those materials and start to train up another 2000 young people in Uganda. Our hope is within by 2030, hundreds of thousands will be reached across large parts of Africa. This is an exciting one to do an update on for those of you who are veterans of the Fortune brainstorm design, you will remember this project. It's a Cairns Lis nominated project, and the reason it exists is that today 2 billion. People still lack access to basic hand washing, so we partnered with the Wash Foundation to create a product that was aimed at young children who maybe don't have the ability to wash their hands at home but who we could teach to wash their hands in schools. And what we created together with the Wash Foundation was a very simple product. This is a product in the form of a flip book with no written words, so it transcends language which teaches young children on how to wash their hands in a fun and engaging way, something again that many of us in this room take for granted because we weren't brought up in these environments. Well, we're in a brilliant position, but since we talked about the idea last time, it's become real. We've already taken it to 2500 children. There are many more planned, and this is where it gets even more exciting. I can feel it's electric, isn't it? I won't let me stand by the edge of the stage to make it more exciting. The impact numbers are coming in. The Wash Foundation did a study. They looked at the children who used to be in these schools, fewer than 2 out of 5 used to be washing their hands. They gave them the flip book. They came back 6 months later to see did it make a lasting change, and now 90% of the children were washing their hands with this one single intervention, extraordinary work. The boo team is ever busy. They're now coming up with an app so that they can teach teachers on how to teach on this topic as well. And for those of you in the room who represent sustainability or work with your organizations on contributions, this is exactly the type of area where funding is needed. Another quarter of a million dollars would allow us to reach 600,000 children over the next couple of years, and for that group it would reduce the child mortality risk by as much as 50%. So this is one of the privileges of being at Fortune. I get to speak to other multinationals, other corporates. If you're in a position to help the Wash Foundation, please, please give. They're an extraordinary organization, and you can directly measure the number of children's lives saved through your charitable contributions. Now before we touched on the topic of wells, and here's another one on wells and pumps, but with a slightly different twist. So as before this was aimed at end users, this by contrast is a charity called Water Starters, and they're trying to help engineers, maintenance people to create a new job which is to fix the pumps, particularly here in Kenya where there are issues with access to water. And what this extraordinary team has done is put together not only an app but also a supply chain, a way of accessing parts and tools so that people can train themselves to become pump engineers, maintenance leaders, and to fix the pumps and equipment across Kenya for a profit. It creates a wonderful source of income for them and it creates access to clean water for the communities that they're helping. I'll stay quiet for just a moment, just so you can see some of the screenshots of the type of work that they've been working on together. All of this has now been launched as of this summer. The work has already started. The pumps are being fixed. 50,000 people have access to water now in December 2025 who did not have access to water in the summer, and by 2030, the estimate is that as many as 1.5 million people will have gained access to water because of this scheme. We have time for one more example which I hope will fill you with a sense of what can be done. This is not on water. This is on the topic of education. Now for many of us, when we think about education, we think about reading, writing, or arithmetic. This is a different topic. This is on misinformation. 96% of adults, let alone children, fail to systemically and systematically point out fake information online. We've been able to partner with a charity in a university in Scotland to create a new set of training materials aimed at young adults and adolescents to train them on fake information, on bad actors and people who may be trying to influence their behavior. It's fun, it's engaging, it's competitive, and it's designed to make sure these young people build up a skill set that many of us in this room were never trained on. It's already being prototyped and tested with schools. The response has been extraordinary. We'll roll out to a larger pilot with 10,000 students over the next couple of years, and our hope again because of the IP is that millions of children will be able to benefit by taking that curriculum into their schools when the work is complete. We don't have time to talk about all of the other charities that we're working with, but I do want to acknowledge the extraordinary work they're doing. And for those of you in the room who are interested in the work, please do get in touch. There are two things that we can already offer you. The first one is that academy. For those of you who'd be interested in upskilling your own designers, we've decided to make much of the training that we do free and available for everyone. There are master classes that we've put out from the likes of Patty Moore, from Don Norman, from Maro Pacidi, who we heard from this morning, all available from your designers, and we hope you take the opportunity to take that world class curriculum and teach them about how to design the social impact. The second offer we have is that we are able now to expand our group from the originals as of September next year. We will finish next summer our work on quality education, and next September we will begin a 4 year focus on the dual goals of people and planet health. For those organizations who want to participate, please get in touch and we'll tell you how to do so. That beautifully to the second brings us to the end of our presentation. Every year we come back, every year we'll tell you what we've learned in design for good, but for the moment just allow me to say whether you joined Design for Good or whether you're working on your own social impact initiatives, a huge best of luck to you. We look forward to working together, and together we can design for good.

AI has been core to the video game industry from the very beginning, as designers coded expansive worlds, responsive characters, and immersive experiences for millions of players. Now, how are today’s technologies—generative AI, agentic AI, virtual reality, and so on—changing how people make and play games? And can the design lessons of gaming, from its visual language to how users respond to incentives, be applied to other domains?

Let the Games Begin

OK, so AI has always been core to the video game industry. How are generative and agentic AI and other digital technologies like virtual production changing the way people make and play games, and can design lessons of gaming be applied to other domains? Our next three speakers are well equipped to answer that. We have Haiyan Zheng as a general. and partner gaming AI at Xbox, who's heading up science efforts for consumer facing AI experiences such as gaming co-pilot. She was formerly chief of staff to the CEO of Microsoft Gaming and senior director of innovation at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where she served as technical adviser to the lab director. We have Lee Shueman who created and developed successful platforms, products, and devices at Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox. His work on rare LTD's Connect sports franchise earned him two BAFTA awards, including Best Family Games. Now, as chief product officer at Effecta Education Group, he leads the vision and development of Effeta's AI-powered education system. And finally we have Betta Liu, who is the AI lead for Justice Mobile, Netty's Games, one of China's largest PC and mobile game developers. She oversees large scale AI systems for the sort of Justice title, enabling players to create short form animations reaching billions of views across platforms like TikTok. She's also worked across product design and design strategy, exploring how AI design, and players themselves can develop new forms of expression. Fortune Asia editor and avid video gamer Nick Gordon will moderate this discussion and audience members, please also find headsets on your tables for simultaneous translation for one of our speakers. Thank you. Hello everyone, I'm very, very excited for this conversation. We, we have some content we're going to put up on screen, so let's, let's show that now. But, but you know, Lee, I want to start with you. You know, you're from, you know, Effect Education group, but there is a reason why you are on our stage today at this gaming panel. Could you talk a bit more kind of about, about your path through the gaming industry and then eventually at at Effecta? Yeah, yeah, thanks, Nicholas and hello everybody. So my name is Lee, Lee Shinneman. Um, I'm what you probably call a vintage gamer. I've been in the games industry since the mid 90s. You'll see some of my games playing up on the, on the screen behind. So, you know, a long, a long time caring about how to get players to love what they're playing and you know, and the importance of great design that brings all of that together. So 25 years through a whole range of You know, different devices, different consoles. I had the good fortune to work with some fantastic teams over the years, and for those that know the British, the British awards, I got lucky and won a few BAFTAs. In fact, good timing for this game that that's playing now. And you know, especially over the years I've got to work with some of the most talented game designers in the world, including people like Miya Motosan and Nintendo. And a whole range of like lessons learned about how to make playful experiences, make engaging, and now how to bring that, you know, into the world of education, which is, you know, why I'm on the stage today. I'm seeing Star Fox adventures. I have a soft spot in my heart for that video game which I played as a big player of this as a young. as a as a teenager, um, but Hayan, I want, I want to turn to you because you're, you're in, you're at Xbox, working gaming at Xbox, but you also kind of have a broader scope than that and we have a video we're going to show that that should kind of tell us a little bit of kind of like all the work that you're doing. OK. All right, I'm gonna try and replicate this here. We're off to a great start. And what this board does is I can connect into it through these wires, these um tiny coin cell motors. Oh my God. It makes me forget that I have a trevor. I one of them for a long time. So Haiyan, you know, how does this story kind of then connect to your broader experience in gaming, in design? How does this all come together? Right, thanks, Nicholas. Uh, so I wanted to bring this video today, uh, because, you know, this is a project I worked on several years ago before I came back into gaming, uh, that it's very rare for Us to be witness to these acute moments where technology can have this really profound effect to elevate somebody's day to day, where we can just see it happen that someone just a mundane thing like Emma drawing a straight line that she couldn't do because of her Parkinson's disease, that technology could elevate that moment and make that. This, you know, amazing transformational point for her. And as I moved into gaming as well, it also reminds me of the power of gaming and play in that, you know, at Xbox we talk about that our mission is really to bring the joy and community of gaming to every single person on the planet. And if you think about games, games are really this creative expression embodied through high technology that is really meant to elevate somebody's day to day, bring them to that moment of flow to these kind of new experiences, and that's how I think about technology, that to elevate people's experiences. So we have an opportunity now to kind of dive in deep into one game in particular, Sword of justice, Beta, that's the game you're working on, and we're going to kind of walk through some of the things that you're working on with this massively multiplayer online video game. Hello Aaron, my name is Beta Liu. I'm the game AR designer from Sword of Justice. So what is justice? It's a flagship open world MMO we launched at 2023. Uh, right now we have millions of players. So AI is not only a tech buzzword, but also their companions and also their creation tools in our game. In justice, you could customize your own companion from appearance to voice to their background settings. It will remember all of the interactions and involve over time. It's not only just a quest giver, but also a really true relationship. And also we provide all kinds of high freedom tools for the players with AI assisted, for example, the motion capture and the face sculpting and archi architecture building. So, uh, literally the players are building all around the world in our game. And also we help build a 3D TikTok in our game just like the uh the video you could just swipe and also uh shoot with their own avatars in just a second. This has, this has had millions, bills of players or the Chinese TikTok. So the design philosophy for us is very simple. The first one is agency. The world will react to every choice and the creation the players made. And the second one is interdependence, which means that we use AI to connect players to make sure that they feel they are part of the community. And right now we are working towards our um our end, which is a digital Western world. We are trying to shift from exploring maps to exploring societies. It's a world where the drama is unscripted and the possibilities are infinite. So Lee, I want, I want to turn back to you. You know, you've made this jump now from gaming to education. You know, what are some lessons that you think you've learned from working in game design that you're now bringing to this new industry? Yeah, well, let's let's first take a look at the pain of education, I guess, and I'm sure many of you in room of sat in, maybe not in Victorian time classrooms, but classrooms don't haven't really changed that much for many, many hundreds of years. And when you see us going into online lessons or Zoom meetings and everything else that we do, this kind of set up of sitting there all in a row and listening to a teacher and not really engaging with with the with the learning material and really focused on the learning outcome. So to the next slide please, Nicholas. So then. You know, at at EF sector we really care about making sure the student achieves the learning outcome, and I think, you know, many, many educational services around the world attempt it, but I think a big part of this is how to unlock the skill of the teacher. So what you're seeing on the screen here is the teacher is in front of a green screen. We've taken all the key lessons from live streaming and video gaming and brought it into this unique experience where the teacher is front and center inside the content. We run about 5 million classes, online classes like this every year, and you know that amazing set of information and data that we're getting now which will come to my next section in a minute. But I think what you can see from here on screen is, is, you know how we're taking lessons like immersion. making sure the teacher has agency and is able to teach how they want, how the student is able to learn how they want some of these visual tricks, and what you're seeing now on screen is the next iteration of that as we move into a world of agentic AI teaching. Now, you know, I should preface this to say we're not here to remove the human out of the loop. That's not the intention at all, but a big part of the world that we deploy our platform and solution in the global South, there's a huge shortage of teachers, maybe about 5 or 6 million shortage of English teachers, 8 million STEM teachers. So where we, you know, we're operating today maybe in Brazil in All across Latin America we care about giving those students that real opportunity to transform their lives and if that means then bringing AI into the class in a unique way and blending all of these different gaming elements, then you know this, this is, this, this really ultimately is that future. Um, you're seeing some different, different aspects on screen. This one now is just more about role playing for some different, different target segments, maybe not, maybe not in school, but we've deployed now to 4 million students across Latin America. We have new pilots rolling out across the world and again, like I said, the goal here is to now put agentech AI into the classroom, but there to support and sit alongside the teacher all the time. So high end, we take the slide down now, you know, I, I like going to turn to you. So what exactly are you doing specifically at Xbox in terms of kind of what you're doing with AI? Right, so, uh, you know, at Xbox we're really thinking about how to leverage AI to elevate the gaming experience, elevate that player experience, um, so one of the things we Launched recently is a gaming co-pilot. We launched this about 2 months ago on mobile and on PC, and the idea is that when you're playing a game, you can bring up a copilot and you can have a conversation while you're playing. You can, if you get stuck somewhere, you can ask questions and be like, hey, what's this boss? How do I, you know, what are some tips and trick tricks for getting past this boss? Um, you know, tell me about, I forgot what this mission was about. Tell me about the mission, and that might seem like super simple ideas, but it really, I think, um, brings to life gaming and what gaming is about because, you know, when, when a developer is making a game, they want the player to have that flow experience, to be um immersed in the game. As Lee said, to be really kind of deeply focused, but what happens is, you know, you get to a puzzle and you just can't solve it, and then you're like flipping to your browser, to your search engine, you're searching for stuff, you get on YouTube, you forget what you're doing, and then much later, maybe like a couple of weeks later, you come back to the game. So what we want to do is we want to make gaming even more fun, even more exciting through gaming co-pilot, and we're also thinking. About other AI features whether that's AI that sits on your device or AI that sits in the cloud that really highlights and makes special the gaming experiences you have with your friends. As someone who is constantly trying to look for the solution to a puzzle or a boss fight and not being able to find anything but a 3 hour long YouTube video. It can be tricky as a player, I can tell you, you know, but I want to go back to you. You know, given that you are working on designing and developing this video game, you know, beyond the AI conversation, what are some other lessons that you think can be learned about, you know, how to keep people engaged, how to make these games fun, how to keep them playing your game for a long period of time like MMOs are supposed to be? What are some lessons that that you've learned? Yeah, the first one would be, um, Will be the player agency and then the second one, I think it will be the social connection. Uh, for the player agency, we find out that uh the beauty and freedom is like the universal language across the scene. It's very essential to provide high freedom to for the players. Nowadays for younger players, the hardcore not only means combat, but also means the deep expression. The players will be willing to create and share what they created to Douyin, to Xiaohongshu, which will bring back a lot of traffic for the game. The second one is, um, social connection. We want to make the players will be needed in the game and um it will drive them back to the game in the long term. You know, Lee, I, I want to build on something that you sort of talked about as part again, lessons from the game industry to the rest of, to the rest of the industry, you know. Gamification, it is a buzzword. It's people talk about, oh, we have to gamify this. We have to give people scores. We have to turn this into a game, and that's how we engage people and I know from our, from our briefing chats that this is not a thing that you necessarily endorse. So, so, so what's the better way to think about about this idea of gamification and what should designers actually do? I mean, following on what what Betta just mentioned that that idea of player agency. is true in learning, you know, we, our platform is student driven, so by giving the student the ability to kind of drive that learning outcome as much as by themselves with that teacher there to facilitate, I think it's ultimately the like the core thing to lean in on. Um, you know, this idea of gamification has been around for many years. It tends to manifest itself as high scores, streaks, you know, all of these things that are that are meaningful for maybe certain social media products. But at the end of the day, like if you, if you're, if you're there to learn, you have to put in the time and then the effort. There's too much conversation. In around, you know, I can make learning faster. I can make learning easier, but really what you should be focused on is how to make learning more engaging, how to make learning learning more meaningful, and then from that point, take those elements to keep you in the learning experience, the same as keeping you in a gaming experience and finding ways to keep you motivated, motivated as a student. And you know, for everyone in here, we're all life lifelong learners, otherwise you know you guys wouldn't be here in this conference. So again, a lot of what we're talking about is how to maintain that ability to learn from, from the moment you start in school to the moment you're, you're, you know, it's. End of your days, but ultimately finding the ways to engage and bring all of these gaming elements that are really what gaming is about, which is like I said, that that giving the player control and agency and letting them take the lead and the fun that comes from that. Hi Anne, I want to go back to you and talk a bit more about kind of what Microsoft's doing with AI and gaming. I know there's this, there's the muse model, and I'm not going to remember everything that it can do, but there's, but, but you're experimenting with kind of these, these more expansive AI. AI possibilities, including for things like game preservation. I want you to talk a bit more about these other kind of more experimental things that you're trying to do. Um, well, earlier in the year in February, our research partners in Microsoft Research, they published a paper in Nature, and this is the first kind of video game AI model publication in nature. And what they did was they took a video game, and then they trained an AI model. On all the telemetry, all the footage of that video game, so that the AI model could basically simulate a playable version of the game without the original game engine. So earlier you heard Rockwell Group talk about unreal engine and talk about um how you know, putting visualization into the engine. Well, imagine in the future an AI model encompasses all. All of that and can simulate the world, um, whether that be a game world or a hotel interior, and it is all inside the model. And I think that the real capability of that is that now the AI can allow you to express to prompt for what you really want to do with that world, for what you want to do in that space. So as an example, this publication was called the Muse Model in nature. Um, as an example, the research. Team, they discovered that the AI model could do certain things like you could cut cut out a character and you could drop it into as you're playing a game, you could just cut and paste a character into your level and suddenly the AI model sees the character that you've just cut and pasted out of 2D pixels and starts animating it and starts making it come alive. So immediately it changes what you could do with video games. And I think this really can spark imagination about what is the future of play. And I think the challenge is always we don't quite, we we need that imagination. We need everybody in this room and creators across the world to think about what new things that you could do with gaming through the use of AI and I think that will really help us drive this new capability. And these are new models. This is not GPT, this is not Gemini, this is a new kinds of models that models that we call world models. Um, and as part of this, you know, we had a discussion about game preservation and um it's kind of a side topic, but game preservation is really interesting, you know, we engage a lot in backwards compatibility, making sure that all of the games of past generations can be played on Xbox on future devices. At the same time, I know that, you know, I love. And I love Dig Doug, um, and Cubbert, but younger, but that's because I'm more into the retro, the nostalgia of it, right? But if I put my 10 year old daughter in front of Cubbert, um, or Dig Dug, she's going to get bored very easily. And what I've discovered is that, you know, there are, uh, game preservation platforms out there, something like Antstream. I think is a fantastic platform and what they've discovered is in order to introduce games to a new audience, they've had to take the essence of the game and create new experiences. So they take a game and they allow you to jump directly to the key point in the game that's the most fun, and you can play and you can compete with your friends. So it's not exactly preservation of the original game, it's Introducing the essence of that experience to to a new generation, and I think there is now capability for AI for AI to learn, um, the backward, back catalog of games and to be able to allow new generations to. Experience these games in new ways. So these are all still speculative, um, but this is some of the research that we are driving forward in order to open up new capabilities for, for games that, you know, also beta is working on as well. Well, I think with that kind of very expansive view of what AI is bringing to the gaming industry, what the gaming industry brings more broadly to design questions and other industries, I want to thank Le Haiyan, Beta. Thank you so much for talking us through this huge industry today. Please give him a round of applause. Thanks.

Design is re-imagining the places where we work and travel, making them more multipurpose and multifunctional. An architect from the world’s largest architecture firm shows how offices, airports, and lifestyle spaces are evolving to offer more flexibility, choice, and connection to serve professional and personal needs simultaneously.

When Work is an Experience (Not a Place)

From designing corporate culture, we moved to designing corporate spaces. More and more where we work and travel are not just places but entire experiences. Rae Wen, who leads the Hong Kong office for the global design and architecture firm Gensler, has over 20 years specializing in workplace and hospitality projects. He and Fortune's Kristen Soler will explore how offices and airports are evolving, offering much more choice, flexibility, and connection. Please welcome them. All right, Ray, thank you so much for joining me. So Ray, clearly the future of work in the world of work has changed a lot in the past couple of years. So I want to start by asking you what is the most surprising way that people are working today that you didn't anticipate 5 years ago and how are you designing for that today? Um, I think the most exciting thing is work is not work anymore because after COVID, even before COVID, you can work anywhere. Uh, what COVID did was just supercharged it, so I don't know about you guys, but I work 24/7 a week since the phone is there. Some pinged me because we work with US time, European time. You just got to be attentive to your clients, especially global clients, and I think that's the biggest change right now for a lot of the workplace designers, and for me personally, I think it's such an exciting. Um, time in the workplace design arena. Yeah, now I know you said people can work from anywhere, but there are a lot of companies that are requiring their employees to come back into the office 5 days a week. How are you thinking about that, about workers who might be reluctant to come back into an office and return to the office, and how, what does that tell you about kind of employee behavior that corporate leaders are still overlooking? I think the two biggest challenges for a lot of the um corporate real estate heads and Fortune 5G companies is I've got so much asset and if people can work anywhere, how can I drive the utilization up? That's really what the biggest problem to solve. And with AI and technology, a lot of us can't forecast how much head count we're going to have next year. So it used to be like back 10 years ago, I'll get a spreadsheet from a client, oh yeah, this is day 2, day 3 forecast, I'm gonna hire this many people, we'll go do the plan and design. These days that answer just keeps shifting. So what are the biggest changes and challenges is how do we bring people back and make the space transformational so the utilize this can go up. So we're no longer in. The headquarters and campus at least we're no longer just designing workplaces, we're actually designing experiences because if you think of what bringing us together as human beings is, well, if I can work anywhere, why do I want to go to work? I can do it at home. So you really got to make the campus or the workplace be more than work, um, and that's the fun part of it. And from that I just saw a quick slide. Yeah, let's see. We do um surveys every year. I thought this was really interesting. Um, this is actually an employee survey that Genza do annually, um, and then this year in 2025, we, we asked them, you know, from my experience and point of view, what makes a great workplace. And if you look at the top 10, it's really food. It's about wellness, they didn't even mention anything about work, like everybody just like pick all the stuff that really, that we want as a human being. I mean this morning, if you listen to our topics, it's all about that user experience, that human experience, whether it's. About, um, a stadium or workplace or hospitality, is that is the thing that brings us together. Uh, and I think right now, um, what we are doing more than ever is creating teams that can deliver these experiences. Um, I used to have a team of, you know, um, probably 80% workplace designers, planners, strategists, and then 20% probably could do a little bit of breakout and a bit of FFNE, um, but these days I've got event planners. I've got like someone who's full FMB, um, FFME expert, uh, work in hotels, etc. um, and then we talk about experience. What is the entrance experience for the guests, um, how do they mingle with the back of house staff? Like that's the type of conversation that we talk about. So that's a very different landscape. Can you give me an example of something really interesting you designed for a workplace centered around the food experience? Um, yes. I just clicked this slide because it's very similar to this, um, I can't show you the project I'm talking about, this is in super here, uh, project I worked on, um, very passionately this, it was during COVID, it was completed, it was uh 500 square, um, Uh, 50,000 square meters, so roughly around 5000 square feet, um, and the brief from the client was we now got people 50% of my of their staff whilst working from home. Um, how do we bring them back? So we brainstormed with all the stakeholders and the people who are putting money on the table to design this new headquarters in Shua, um, and it turns out in the end we designed it like 15 different food offerings, including trying to bring blue bottle in, uh, we end up, Designing a secret bar that was basically vinyl bar, those of you who have been to Tokyo, it's really big where they got um they play vinyl, you're not allowed to really talk, it's a silent bar. So it's like a no tech bar which is similar to a library concept where you don't talk to your phone, etc. but they just put a spin on it, and that became a memorable experience where everybody go to that headquarter, can I go to the secret bar? And it becomes a story for that global organization. That's the iconic moment. In Tokyo, so that that's a really exciting, uh, still to this day one of the most amazing projects I've worked on. That is really cool, I think. When I think about your job, the toughest part, I think, is you have on one hand you have employees who are like, that is so cool. I would love to go to a record bar. And then on the other hand you have employees that are like, I don't want to spend any more time in the office, and you're tricking me with free food and a bar and this is not going to help me want to go back into the office. How do you, how do you thread the needle and are there any, you know, tricks and tips you use when you're when you're thinking about that, um. It depends on our organization, obviously, because, um, if you work with a tech client versus a financial um client, very different, um, although they both want great experiences, but the kind of offer, um, that they need for other things, other for their staff, in terms of guest experience slightly different, um, there's a lot more labs, um, and also maker space within tech. um, so what we realize now. Um, we used to design for a lot of headquarters, we designed 80%, we leave 20% for the client to flex. What's actually happened now is we designed 50%. The other 50% has to be transformational. So what I mean by that is we are designing less and less built in space, furniture, modularity and removable items, so you can transform a space when you need to from a, Whether it's an FNB for the staff and then transmit event space or a happy hour space for your clients, um, and where you put those within the building it's also very important accessibility from the guest experience, but you also got to be very careful about security because we're working with companies here. So that type of complexity is actually making workplace almost like um creating a mixed use, I call a city in a city, um, and it's, it's very exciting. And a good example is actually this global client of ours. Um, if I didn't tell you, you wouldn't know Sanofi is actually a pharmaceutical R&D, um, tech company. Um, you know, we, we used to think if you're into, um, medical, um, and pharmaceutical, you have white box and say this is the staff and client, um, cafeteria canteen. Um, which is to me, you'll find that in any restaurant, but if you really look carefully at the furniture, it's removable, um, it's layered. It's got different zone, but we try to figure a way how can you transform this space when you need to, but you can still have this space for happy hour, etc. And because work is always on the go, and I think maybe everyone in this room is guilty of, you know, doing their work from an airport on their way to this conference, I know you're also transforming airports and lounge spaces as well. Tell me a bit more about that. Ah, that's a, that's another thing, um, so because we now can work anywhere, uh, what we are finding, I'm gonna skip some of this lie, I'll go straight to the airport. Um, we found that airport is now the new, it's not a transit hub anymore. It's actually a new place where you recharge. Depending on day you go on business or you dare to travel, um, the need at the airport is very different. We used to just go there, check in, it takes forever to line up, right? Now a lot of airports, what they're trying to do is reduce that time to check in. And they're trying to increase the time so you can linger at the after check-in to enjoy the FNB, enjoy the lounges, enjoy whether you want to work, rest, or relax, whatever you want to do, they want to provide that. Um, and surprisingly, um, I mean this is a new terminal that's coming out of JFKK. we now got a lot more outdoor indoor space, natural light, past the actual, um, check-in area. Uh, airports used to be just like you check in, you'd be sitting there waiting. If you're lucky, you're business class or whatever, you're going to go to a lounge, but now it's even just a normal going through the airport you can experience all that. It's a destination. It's no longer just a transit. That's what I think is also interesting about what you do is that you're both creating, you're you're designing these terminals, these lounges as high performance workspaces in and of themselves. Does that risk airports competing with offices? who are you looking to please when you design all this stuff? I think they're becoming. Like all areas of practices, is becoming more and more overlapped. Um, I summarize this just to give a high level. This is what you expect an airport lounge now. It's, it's really about that full, uh, work, play live and rest and recharge, it's all those items expected. So designing these small lounges, you've got to create a setting that have all the layers that cater for whether it's at work or other things and, That's, it becomes a lot more rich the entire experience, um, and that's what we are seeing and it's very exciting. What are some of the most interesting features that you've designed for in an airport or in a lounge that you think are totally things that no one's thinking of? Uh, massage room is getting more and more common. Um, it's, it's almost even if, if those of you fly with Cathay, um, they've had. Massage and wellness for a while, at least in the first class, but it's almost that it's becoming much more of a norm. Like it's not just the best premiere, you'll get that all around the world you see a lot more wellness factor adding in, whether they go full massage chair or massage bed with mass, um, they're going to give that. Offer and that's getting more and more about not just a transitional waiting space, it's how can I make people feel better, more positive flying with a specific airline and that directly relates to their brand. Uh, at the end of the day, all this is still to do business. Nothing comes for free, right? Um, so it's all about trying to express their culture through the experience of the lounge, the airport for the city, and for headquarter to represent that, uh, Fortune 500 company. Now we've talked about the customer. I want to talk about the client because expectations, I think, have changed for you, especially with the advent of AI and predictive analytics. Talk to me about how that has changed your process for for prototyping and what your clients expect from you today, for better or for worse. Um, yeah, exactly, for better or worse. So I will skip this one. It's just one of the new lounges, um, Minor Iconic. I think everything this morning is about more about architecture, big space. I think interiors, we are much more about those, um, the things you can touch and what you can remember when you go through the space experience. So these days there is just a lounge and also a JFK, um, but the hardest thing is we used to get a lot of time to design these, uh, you know, you can, you can say anything up to one year. The challenge for us is we now are expected to produce record speed. Um, one particular client is that I want this in light speed, Ray, light speed. OK, I go what do you mean like light can you just give me ASAP like now, um, so it's quite interesting because AI has transformed how we work. If you look at what I've got up in the screen, the left hand side is a project I worked on around 2 years ago. Um, so what we used to do, I'm more old school, so I'll do hand sketch ideas, narrate it, and start working with my team on looking at the 3D model, we build physical model as well just to see how the space goes, and eventually get to a semi-final one. These are not final output, these are just work in progress. Um, that would take probably about 1 to 2 weeks, depending on the project complexity. Um, the one on the right, that was just last week. Um, it was 1 day, full on, we built a white model first. The client gave us basically 2 to 3 days. It's like the reason he told me, well, I saw my friend clicking on Nano Banana, those of you know that app. Um, and say, well, if they can do it in a second, why can't design firms can do it quicker? So we end up going, OK, because it's hard to explain to a client when they're not architects. Um, as designers we see design as more time, craftsmanship, and you kind of. Bit by bit, get to a result that is the perfect graph, whereas what we're seeing a lot more with the AI, we're now almost like a creator, like all these art pieces, and we try to select what is suitable and that's the only way we can manage that um need from client on speed and time. Um, and it's, you see positive or negative, I think it really depends on the project. Um, your project got time, of course, you can have a lot more ideation and use it as a tool. Um, but what we're seeing more right now is clients asking for immediate response is, it's the trend. I mean, everyone is just so used to clicking and getting it straight away, and they're expecting from the consultants, and I think it's not going to go away. Um, the clients who give you time, um, like what Populists had for the uh the Pearl in Hong Kong and Um, the hotels with Andre food, that's being more rare. There's still those clients, but I think the clients who expect immediate outcomes, we're going to have to find a workflow that can achieve what they need. Now Ray, in our last minute together, I have one last question for you about the future. What's the future scenario that Genzler is actively designing for that most companies haven't even imagined yet that you think is going to be the next big trend of the future? Tomorrow we're going to launch our annual design forecast. This is the 14th edition. I can't answer all that because actually all in here. OK, we're going to share it with everyone today, but I asked, they said no, you've got to wait till tomorrow. All right, what a, what a teaser for all of us to look forward to tomorrow. But the big big one is about experience. It's all about experience, whether you're in a workplace or you're in retail or you're in hospitality, it's all about experience focus. Well, thank you so much, Ray, and good luck with that tomorrow. Thank you.

Charles and Ray Eames, famed for their iconic furniture, believed in constant prototyping to improve and refine their designs. They insisted that well-made products should be functional and accessible for all. Their granddaughter and the president of their institute, who keep their legacy alive, introduce their plans for a new art and design museum and describe their mission to cultivate curiosity that inspires positive problem-solving for our world.

Constant Curiosity

Hello, everybody. It's wonderful to be here to share about the work of Ray and Charles Eames and the work that we're doing today at the institute. I think I'm pushing the right button. M Ah, we're gonna go, can we go back? You can go back. Here we are. Ray and Charles Eames were a husband and wife team that worked together for over 30 years. Some of you might recognize their iconic lounge chair and Ottoman. When they were designing this chair, they actually said they were designing seating, not chairs. They said if you call it designing a chair, you're eliminating the ottoman before you've even thought of it. And this is part of what we love to share with the work of Ray and Charles is not just the objects themselves, but the questions Ray and Charles were asking while working on the projects. These are 3 etchings that Charles did. He trained as an architect and then also taught himself photography, working with his father's wet plate prints and also as a painter. When he traveled, he liked to do sketches that he turned into etchings when he got back home. Now Ray grew up in California. She studied fashion in New York and then also painting at Hans Hoffman's studio in New York and became one of the co-founders of the American Abstract Artists in 1937. This is one of her paintings from the Hans Hoffman era. Now, because so many of us were traveling here today, we thought you might like a glimpse of their passports for all the many travels that they did around the world. What we do is we love to compare and add the itineraries that they have with their passports, and it helps us show how they went around the world doing everything from IBM Pavilion in New York to also working in Moscow and even India too. Now the thing about Ray and Charles is they worked very hard, but as they also said they like to take their pleasure seriously. So on one of the photo shoots they actually jumped on this motorcycle. Do you notice the kick stand is down and it's one of the iconic pictures of them working together today. Now in about after 25 years of working together, they were asked to explain the design process, and this is how they did it. What they said is there's one circle that their office and themselves want to accomplish on the project. The second was also their client, but there was always a third circle society as a whole, and you had to focus on the part that overlapped for all three. That might be making the exhibit Mathematica for IBM in 1961. It might be making a leg splint during World War II to help the Navy with some of the injured soldiers, so everything they did fell into that area of overlapping interest. Now what's interesting is they took that idea farther with that little smaller diagram below. That's actually 5 circles, and when they spoke about making chairs for Herman Miller and Vitra, it actually had to be 5 areas of overlapping interest. It had to be good for the company, good for the person on the line actually making your chair, good for the designer, good for the community, and good for the environment. That's goodness all the way down is what they called it. Another way they like to say that is we wanted to make the best for the most for the least, the best product for the most people for the least amount. That was always the goal. This is my mother with Ray. I don't know if you know. Ray actually designed some of her own clothing. She'd often make one for my mother too. The best part of my grandmother's clothing was that she would put 8 to 10 pockets in her skirts, so she had a place for her camera, her sewing kit, her sketch pad, her keys. It was really what I realized later was her tool kit, and she was always prepared. Now, something that was also made special for my mother when she was growing up were letters that my grandfather used to write to her. It's called a rebus. This was before there were emojis. They were called Rebus letters. And what this says is, Lucia. I am so sorry that I cannot take you to school. Are you drinking milk like an angel? It rained all the way to Arkansas. Love Daddy. That was from one of his business trips when he was working on the churches in 1930s. It's one of my favorite artifacts in the collection. Now here's me with my grandfather. I love getting a chance to go visit them. They never talked down to us. They shared whatever they were working on. It could be a film, a toy, an exhibit, and what I loved was just being around them. You learned how they were solving problems. They call that more found learning less teaching, just being aware that way. Something they told when I said I wanted to be a sculptor, the most important thing is that you love what you're doing, and the second that you're not afraid of where your next idea will lead, and they really did that themselves. They really let their designs come from the learning. They said one of the most important things was to get away, put away your preconceived notions and let your designs come from the learning and working in those materials. Here's me and my mother and Charles on one of those visits. It was always exciting to get a chance to go visit Venice, California, not Venice, Italy, Venice, California, and yet to see what they were working on. I remember these as a grandchild, but today what's exciting is to look at these things as a chief curator because really everything that my grandparents did was about communicating ideas. It just happened to be through a piece of furniture, an exhibit, a graphic, whatever. And so what we're doing that today is sharing how they apply these ideas and really what was the best way to share what they wanted to communicate. Here's just one of the love correspondences when they shared with me, and I'm realizing now the greatest gift they gave me was the time that I got to spend with them. Now this is the place that my mother and I called home. She was on this side. My husband and I and our children are over there on the right hand side. She built this home when she inherited the collection from their space at 901 Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, and she wanted to create a space where she could house the collection, share it with. who wanted to borrow pieces, but what ended up happening is friends and colleagues would come over and we started immersing and showing people all the different areas that Ray and Charles worked in. Most people enter the world of their work through the furniture, but for this case they could also be seeing some of the raw materials that Ray and Charles were working with at the time. Now what's fun about the drawers, these drawers happen to come from the graphics room at the office, is when you get to open them. And you get to see some of the raw materials that they worked with to actually make the products that they did. And in this time of so much of a digital age, it's been so exciting to watch our guests be able to see the tools that Ray and Charles, the prototypes that they made, being so hands on in the learning. This is the gallery space at my mom's home. What's really special about this for me is something that I'm hearing mentioned a few times today. As I look at each one of those chairs, I'm thinking about that Ray and Charles used to talk about the sum of all constraints. Each project that they worked on had its own peculiar list, they said, whether it was a chair, an exhibit, a film, and so what you have to think about, they always said, is, is it a constraint of price, of material, of surface, of time, and really think through. Everybody who's going to touch that chair from the sourcing of the material to when it might be thrown away later. And so what I appreciate is the discussions I've heard today is really thinking through that guest host relationship, something else that my grandparents talked about, which is anticipating the needs of your client before they've thought of it. Here's my mom and me. I'm so excited that today we are John and I are going to work together on a dream that was my mother's with how do we share this collection even more. And 7 years ago yesterday, John and I met, author and also ar. Test himself and wanting to really take this idea and amplify it in as many ways as possible, we've been doing things with pop-up exhibits, creating publications, and so with this, I would like to hand it over to my extraordinary partner and co-founder John. Thank you, Lisa. At the core of Charles and Ray's work is curiosity. They had this insatiable curiosity for the world around them. And so when we were conceiving of this organization, we came up with the name the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. We wanted Eames and Institute to be even more fun than Eames alone implies, and so we modeled it after Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and this is what we got. So we've been really intrigued by how curiosity has piqued people's interests as much, sometimes even more so than Eames. So there were 5 things that I think we want to walk through very quickly with the work of the institute. The first is about being a good host, and we do that at our principal headquarters now in Richmond, California. And there is no better host, let me assure you, than my co-founder Lisa. This is Lisa taking care of the land at the Eames Ranch on the left, and Lisa guiding tours as she does almost every day at our archives. Here's a small glimpse into what guests get to experience, and as Clay mentioned, it's this amazing sampling of the parts and pieces that went into what Lisa describes as the home runs, their iconic chairs, their films, their exhibits, things of that sort, and we get to watch day over day people react to these physical objects in such a, you know, a time of digital consumption, and we're so fortunate to be able to do that. The second area is craft, and this is something that I certainly associated with Eames because Lisa and her mother had their practices, their art practices at the ranch long before I arrived, and we've tried to in the in the time period that we're going to create an immersive Eames experience again at the ranch, we've tried to welcome artists, designers, and creatives to come and hone their craft, and so they've drawn on some of the most basic tools. Which we think are very important to return to again in this time of digital technology. They've tended to our textile studio, our wood studio, our metal shops, etc. They've also worked with our team to draw on the collection for inspiration, and they've worked with our team that tends to the land. Our farmers and others in order to bring new new modes of of medium to their practices, and these are but two of our amazing artists that were part of our pilot year cohort this year. On one hand, a very experienced artist named Wendy Chin, and on the other, a very up and coming artist who had her first residency with us at the Eames Ranch, Kristen Steyn, and we're so proud to be working with both of them. The third area is around connections around community. Community was so important to the life and the work of Ray and Charles, and this quote, I think, speaks to it well. Eventually everything connects people's ideas, objects, the quality of the connections is the key to the quality per se. And so with that we knew that there were many more people than just Ray and Charles or just us or just our team or even our artists and residents who were using curious problem solving to address some of the world's most intractable challenges, as well as simply bring the light and joy into our world. And so we conceived of this program called the Curious 100 through through which we would identify 100 curious problem solvers initially in the United States and expanding in 2027 to be more global, and it was such an amazing opportunity for us to convene this group of people. We broke it down into 10 categories. We hoped that we could identify like what what are the variety of people that practice curious problem solving. And so within each one of these categories are 10 people as well, including one of our speakers coming up soon, Kevin Bethune, and we had a chance to welcome this group of people in a couple of different formats to our archives to be in community and work with us and workshop ideas, and we hope to do a lot more of that going forward. The third area is around the details. The 4th area is around the details, and this is something that we have a chance to share when people can get up close with the material, sometimes even hold it in their hands. And we had an opportunity this year to take one of San Francisco's most iconic buildings, the Transamerica Pyramid Center, and to partner with Chave Development that owns Transamerica now and bring not just our brand to the pinnacle of the of the Transeric pyramid but bring our collection to the city. San Francisco and so we selected a small group of objects. We brought them to the Transamerica Annex gallery and over the course of the past 6 months we've welcomed over 40,000 people through these doors free and open to the public seven days a week and it's such a beautiful exhibit bathed in natural light. It's called Past as Prologue The Last Decade of Eames furniture in 1968 to 1978. And we've held public programming of all types, outdoor movie screenings, um, you know, talks and other things of the sort in the gallery, and it's just been amazing to be right in the heart of San Francisco, especially at this time of rebirth there. And the fourth area is, excuse me, the 5th area is to think about, well, what do we take from all of this, how do we keep iterating, and how do we bring all of this to scale? And so the quote that we love from Ray and Charles is, how do we get from where we are today to where we want to be. And in August of this year we had a chance to acquire this extraordinary complex. It's a former corporate campus for two multinational corporations, McGraw Hill Publishers and Birkenstock later, and we are planning to transform this building and campus that was essentially Not utilized for the past decade or more and turned into a world class art design and creativity museum. We're so thrilled to be the stories of this new campus, and we've got the opportunity now to work with Herzog and Demeron, Basel-based architects that have designed multiple major museums as well as worked on adaptive reuse in really compelling ways. So today for the first time we're sharing a few interior images from the conceptual design phase of this work and so this is inside the warehouse which is this very distinct hyper parabolic roof structure and our intention is to take this from a super raw industrial space and to bring slightly warmer elements like wood. into it as well as to open up and create a true indoor outdoor connection. It's a curtain wall system so we're able to effectively eliminate all of the exterior walls, and we're so excited to be working with this with these spaces. There will also be Huge spaces like the Tate Modern or the the Armory in New York that have opportunities for extremely large, flexible events, temporary exhibits, and who knows what else we can dream up. There will also be extraordinary outdoor spaces, public plazas, water features, sculpture, and miles and miles and miles of walking trails across both this 90 acre site as well as our adjacent properties. And we're not just working with the existing spaces, we're taking, for example, this underside of a of a parking lot and turning it into a conditioned space that could be an educational center or something of the sort. And these are just some of the spaces that we've started to consider as we enter into our schematic design phase. We're so excited to bring this project online. Our goal is by 2030. We've got an incredible group of partners. We're always looking for more. In the meantime, we're so excited to be welcoming an array of groups, companies, organizations, institutions to partake in our ENS archives experience as well. And In 2030 we hope to welcome you all to what we are calling the Museum of Infinite Curiosity, and it will use Ray and Charles's legacy as the cornerstone, but it will expand far and wide to other creative legacies. It will showcase the work of other contemporary stars, people that you could name, and it will bring to the world emerging artists and emerging voices that have really truly yet to be discovered. This is a quote by John as we've been interviewing more and more and sharing about this extraordinary next step, but for me, I just think it really sums up what our goal is. The world's greatest resource is human curiosity. It is the force that guided the Eameses through a lifetime of exploration, fuels every act of design, and will continue to shape our collective future. The Museum of Infinite Curiosity will honor that for, give it form, space, and voice, becoming a home for curious problem solvers, and we look forward to welcoming you in 2030. Thank you.

Designers build a practice around responding to change, especially when projects move through moments filled with unknowns. A senior leader at one of the world’s leading architecture firms shares how both conceptual approaches and practical tools like real-time video game engines allow teams to explore shifting ideas together and shape more resonant spaces.

Building Real Worlds with Unreal Platforms

Cities and investors around the world are discovering the transformative power of sports to rejuvenate districts, attract tourists, and drive economic growth. An architect from a global design firm that builds iconic stadiums and arenas explains the magic of creating spaces like Hong Kong’s Kai Tai Sports Park and the challenge of balancing design for local versus global audiences.

In the Arena

So if AI is giving us back our time during work, where are we spending it after work? Our next speaker knows where to go for both fun and recreation. Ismael Merchin is one of Asia's leading sport and entertainment venue designers who works as an architect for Populist, a global design firm that builds iconic stadiums and arenas. Most recently, Ismail contributed to Kai Tak Sports Park, a 28 hectare sports and entertainment precinct in Hong Kong. Cities and investors view sports as a new diplomacy to attract tourists and drive economic growth, and Ismail has witnessed firsthand how sports centers have helped to revitalize districts, strengthen community, and bolster cultural engagement. And now let's step into the arena with Ismael Merchin and Fortune's Nicholas Gordon. Ismael, it's so great to have you here and have you talk about the Kai Tak Sports Park. I see it every day when I take the 101X Express bus back from our office in Kowloon Bay to my home in Kennedy Town. So I see that stadium every afternoon at 6 p.m. as I take the bus, um, and I believe we have some footage we're going to show in the background as we as we have this discussion, but um. So tell us a bit about about the story of the sports park and kind of how you got involved. Yeah, so, um, Kaiak sports, sorry, sports architecture if I, if I want to speak a little bit about sports architecture is fascinating because it's kind of like lives in the core of tradition, culture, community integration with the city. And with the Kai Tak Sports Park we have the amazing opportunity to transform the Kai Tak Airport, but it was like a unique um icon for Hong Kong. I mean probably some of you have been landing in Kai Tak Airport in the past and it was part of the identity of the city, so we have a greater responsibility to define that space that was no longer in use and transform it into a sports park, um, and that park actually. The brief had to serve. I had to do clear instructions. They had to serve. Concerts and world-class events, but it also had to be integrated with community, also had to serve the surroundings, the new area of Kowloon Bay, and with that we have to focus our design for these two kind of like moments that they are so different between one another. That they have to serve two different purposes and they have to actually respond to two different needs. um, so our design was focused to kind of like probably in Hong Kong it's like a concrete jungle like vertical buildings very dense, very congested and concentrated so we, we wanted to create an urban oasis where people actually could come and relax and enjoy the moment and just stroll around without not. Um, uh, not stress that Hong Kong is so, um, so, so related to, so we wanted to kind of like create that moment of peace in the chaos in like the chaos of Hong Kong where people actually could come and enjoy an afternoon with their kids or grandchildren and and I do want to kind of drill into kind of your design approach for this project in a second, but before I do that, I mean. You said, you know, it's built in the old Kai Tech Airport. There is a lot of romanticism about that space, you know, it's, it's, it was one of the, one of these classic sites of Hong Kong, the airplanes, you know, flying over the buildings. You know, how have you tried to kind of work that heritage into the project? Um, so we, we have to, we have to remember that there is no longer an airport, so the identity has changed into a sports park, but obviously we wanted to play homage to kind of like that sentimental feeling, that nostalgia that it was kind of like the Kai Tak Kai Tak Airport. So we have actually recovered and especially during construction it was fantastic. Because we at the moment when we're digging, we actually found so many artifacts from the old airport, like the lights of the runway we even found like one of the bombs from World War II actually that was inactive, so it was like a big moment of the construction where we had to kind of like leave the site and everything for security purposes, but. It was amazing that we, we were actually being built in a life site and we actually kind of like took all these elements that we kind of like find out through the history and we have actually built a small museum next to the um uh the main stadium but it wasn't part of the brief but it was great to kind of like. Keep that essence of what this place was once for the people to enjoy. It's so funny we we romanticize the airport now, but if you look at the archives, everyone is always complaining about the airport. It's too small, it's in the middle of the city, so it's kind of funny that that we now think of it. with this kind of romantic idea, but I want to talk about the, the sports part now. I know when you're looking at a project like this, when you're looking at a building this complex, I mean, what are the sorts of design questions you have to think about and kind of how did you answer them in the context of Kite? Yeah, that's a very good question because we, we tend to design these or we know that these, um, massive buildings, I mean they are not small and they require a lot of space in the city. They, they are urban catalysts. They have that amazing power to basically change completely the urban fabric of a city, and when it's done well, um, it actually can respond to the needs and offer a solution for the the lack of community of, of the city. I mean Hong Kong, for example, with high tech. Hong Kong needed a world class stadium. Um, they needed that uh space where they could actually host and bring um entertainment and put again Hong Kong in the map of events. I mean there is a funny anecdote because Hong Kong had a a a a stadium already. It was a fantastic where the Hong Kong evts were being hosted, but it is a funny anecdote because the city continue growing and it grew around the former stadiums of Hong Kong. And then the noise of a concert became a problem. And uh it was a funny anecdote that in one of the Michael Jackson concerts uh back in the 90s, they gave to people cotton globes, so when they were actually clapping for cheering for Michael Jackson, they were not actually bothering the, the surrounding neighborhoods. But then um the former stadium actually became a little bit um. Uh, not responding to the needs of new artists, new events, and with Kitech, um, talking about technology, it has like probably one of the most technological advanced stadiums right now in the world with the roof, uh, openable roof that, um, is, is located on top of the stadium that it doesn't have only the purpose of controlled weather like you host events when it's raining, but that. The roof is so thick that there is no sound leakage. It's completely soundproof, so you could host a Metallica or ACDC concert inside, and the neighbors around it, they will not hear a sound. So it will, it will actually play well for the location of it is located. And I want to talk about kind of we call it an urban catalyst so that there's a way that these sorts of sports parks and these kind of developments can kind of invigorate a neighborhood, invigorate an area. There are also examples where maybe that doesn't happen, you know, you look at like we'll talk about, you know, urbanism, urban design, and someone's always complaining, here's a stadium, it's surrounded on all sides by giant car park. Like that does not seem like it would be a development that might help a neighborhood. It might even degrade it. So when you're thinking about a sports complex, you know, what do you have to keep in mind to make sure that it ultimately enhances the community rather than degrades it. Good question. Um, When we design stadiums, we, we just come with a concept in mind that these ones are not isolate isolated objects inside a stadium inside like a place. They need to be well connected, well integrated, well threaded with the community that they are located. Um, obviously cultures and, and identities and ways of living in the US, I mean, the use of cars is more like developed that probably in in other places like Hong Kong than the transport, uh, public transport is amazing and everybody use the MTR, um, so but in, in the case of, uh, Hong Kong, we didn't have like that massive space that we just could do whatever we wanted. It's a large space but we needed to actually compact so many things on it. And um the the way that it was connected with the cities is like through so many connections that they are not only used as a corridors for people to go, they are using as a passive wayfinding elements where art is being located, traditional wayfinding is is placed so people actually can find their way around the space and go directly to where they want to be or just. Rest and spare the time in different pockets of um activities that we have placed around the entire space. So there is so many ways to enjoy and leave Kai Tak Sports Park and you know let's talk more broadly now because you know you guys have worked on several of these sports complexes. You have another one being built in the Shaolam sports complex in Malaysia. But you know, given that you've worked on this kind of over, over, you know, decades if not longer, I mean, what are some of the lessons that you guys have learned in developing these sports complexes and how have they had to change to keep up with changing tastes, changing demand, changing uses like what's changed about how you think about a, about a sports complex? So, um, I think all that comes a lot with the operations as well and the design for the purpose that it has been or is going to be built. So there's a lot of talks with the operation uh teams that they're gonna operate once it's open and we need to make sure that these large complexes, they, they, they are built for maybe one. Purpose, uh, for like one games or like um um Southeast Asian games or or something else, but they need to live beyond that event day. You need to make sure that those elements are gonna be continually used by. Either future games or the community or um teams around the place. So Selangor for example is different because it's built for one of the teams in in Malaysia for Selangor, which Hong Kong in that case, the Kai Tak Stadium is not built just for one team itself. So, and, and, and not just for sports either, you know, Coldplay. Correct, I mean like you, you have to actually make sure that it's resilient enough and flexible enough to kind of like host all sorts of types of, of, uh, events. I mean it has been weddings, it has been conferences, it has been, uh, sports concerts, e-sports games in stadium, and we're even building uh one in Middle East that is gonna host like drone racing as well, so it's like. Bring it on. I mean, new ideas are great to kind of like make those stadiums alive and full constantly and you know, and when you're thinking about a city, you know, I talked to cultural people in Hong Kong and they always complain how there aren't enough venue spaces, big or small. There was this viral photo a couple of years ago where it was like in Asia World Expo Hall 1, Olivia Rodrigo, hall 2. Uh, the Belt and Road conference, um, and you don't have to talk about Hong Kong specifically, but you know when it comes to thinking about cities as hubs for entertainment, as hubs for, you know, sports and arts and culture, I mean, what, what are kind of the like what's the balance between having these like giant venues and smaller mid-scale to have a sustainable, you know, entertainment. Factor like this, yeah, so that's a good question because actually I've been talking a lot about the Kaiyak stadium, but the sports park is so much more as well. It has like a um 50,000 spectator stadium but also has like a 10,000 spectator arena and a 5000 spectator sports ground. And with, with these three elements that they are like different in size, you could actually host all sorts of programs, audiences, events that actually will respond to those different needs and you don't have every day. A Coldplay event or uh a Taylor Swift coming into Hong Kong, but maybe you have like other local artists that they have also their audiences and you need to actually kind of like cater for all these wide spectrum of users interest um and that will help not just the operators to kind of like get their um uh return of investments but also like bring Hong Kong in the map and serve the community and and bring the community. More leisure, more elements of a place of the city where they can fully thrive and enjoy. And so what are you thinking about when it comes to kind of sports and how communities experience sports going forward, you know, with new technologies, new ways of consuming like, you know, live streaming stuff like that, but like, do you see the way that people consume sports entertainment changing in the future and do you see sports parks changing along with them? 100%. I think like these buildings are. are not static. I mean, I don't want to see them as static objects. They, they, they are dynamic. They are alive like every day things need to change depending on the event that you're gonna host. Um, uh, we had one of the concerts where the artists, they wanted to actually fly in the center of the stadiums on top of a moon, so you need to actually provide the infrastructure to support their vision, the ideas for that event. Um, so it's, it's great to see that the, the stadium has been designed, resilient enough, flexible enough to actually be able to cater for all these. Human imagination. I mean we spoke before about somebody spoke before about the human imagination. It's great that we are offering a canvas where those artists can bring and and basically explore with the space, bring ideas because ultimately that will echo into the user experience which we are actually um looking into. I like to call ourselves that more than architects we are experienced designers. You know, I, I maybe want to kind of close things off by asking, uh, not, not quite a personal question, but it seems like with a complex like this you get to see, you know, it's not that you just get to see your work being used, but you get to see your work being used in. Extremely large and bombastic ways whether it's the rugby sevens or the Coldplay concert or most recently I think the national games, you know, like what's it like kind of seeing this project that you've worked on like be used in this like really kind of public and and yeah this this really kind of public in a large way and it's it's, it's amazing. I mean it's like for me has been the, the, the biggest reward has been attending one of the first events of, of the stadium and have a, a funny anecdote that. When I started construction, um. Uh, Kaak Sports Park, um, I got also my kids at the same time and I've seen my kids and the sports part actually growing at the same time, and, uh, I, I saw that I knew about this sports park, everything, right? I mean, I've been like walking this, um, construction alleyways for like 6 years in a row, but the moment that I went there with my kids to show them. The first event that it happened, it was a completely new experience. I mean it was like a whole new world of like ideas and feelings actually came to me because I saw the kids enjoying the space, the way that we were designing for it and not just my kids but every other kids and families and and people, it was an athletes as well. I mean we we we we don't just design for the users we design for the event organizers, we design for the the athletes so it was fantastic to see that. Everybody playing a key role and everybody happy with the results of Kai Tak Sports Park. Well, I look forward to catching more mega events at the Kai Tak Sports Park. Ismail, thank you so much for joining us today and talking us through this great new project that just opened in Hong Kong. Please everyone give Ismael a round of applause. Thank you.

AI can analyze, remix, and replicate — but can it help us create something genuinely new? That question now sits at the center of modern design. IDEO CEO Mike Peng argues that AI can be used to generate original work, but only when humans lead with curiosity and intent, using intelligent tools not to repeat what’s been done but to provoke what hasn’t. How can designers push AI beyond familiar patterns, harness it to challenge assumptions, and build workflows where machine intelligence sparks unexpected directions? How can AI be used to produce work that surprises, delights, and stands apart in a world where sameness or even plagiarism is only a prompt away?

The Creative Edges of AI

When we picture the future, what informs our vision? A futurist argues that literature and entertainment exert an overwhelming influence on how we think about what’s next. How can governments, companies, and brands learn from this insight? How can Sci-Fi world-building inspire or distort the way we design policies and products?

Prototyping the Future

Many of our visions of the future with a capital F are inspired or influenced by stories and literature and entertainment. Our next speaker spent much of her youth immersed in science fiction. Starting as a creative director, she made a career in Hollywood, which included futurist consultancy for Disney and Marvel, Black Panther, Wakanda Forever. And advisory work for other media companies such as the BBC, DreamWorks, Universal, as well as other Fortune 500 firms. Now the resident futurist at Nike, Monica Belska, will explore how governments, companies, and brands can apply sci-fi world building techniques to prototype our future and shape the world we want to inhabit. Please welcome Monica to the stage. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to join y'all here today. So we will be speaking how we could be utilizing techniques of sci-fi world building to shape real world impacts. But before we go to the depth of it, I have to share a disclaimer that all views of my own and should not be used to extrapolate future strategies of the companies that I work with or for. So, the real value of IPs such as Avatar and Black Panther is not merely in the narratives on the screen. It is in the universes they have created Pandora and Wakanda. Desire to belong and even more so to feel inspired to participate in a vision of the future creates loyalty and engagement that almost nothing outside of entertainment fandom has achieved. Story world design is a design framework I have been developing, inspired by the world building techniques of sci-fi entertainment, repurposed for real world challenges and opportunities. It is a to prototype compelling future vision and consistent future strategy to flow out of it that is applicable again for the real world challenges for the brands and governments and hopefully to shape better impacts. So now the reason why I wanted to move away from the term world building within sci-fi to story world design. Because world building, when applied to the real world, evokes projects such as Chandigarh or Brasilia. A genius architect descending upon the land and shaping everything in this very much top-down vision. Now story world design goes beyond that by taking into account the organic processes through which cities grow, encompassing the diverse communities, but also another great inspiration for me has been gardening, right? When you garden. It's not just about that first grand act of engineering. It's about adapting to the land because not all seeds grow in the same way and not everything that you first considered to be a weed is a weed. And so in this way, successful story world design sets the foundation for cohesive narratives, heroes, spaces, platforms, and experiences and This success is not just measured by external engagement and the hype that it could create. It is also how do you communicate the future vision that you are creating, not just putting out products, right, but every product creating new opportunities in the world to the stakeholders of the brand and for the government to their own leaders. And it's not just about being reactive, but really proactive in how you shape the future. So sci-fi serves as a lot of inspiration for us. But we have this misconception that it predicts the future. More than anything, it prototypes, sometimes misdirecting us to think that something is futuristic, when really it is not. Many a time it has actually closed down our imagination. To what actually is interesting. And so much of today's misperceptions about the future have in fact been shaped by sci-fi bias, and it has rendered ground fertile for misinformation and especially a lot of misconceptions around science. We think of AI development leading to consciousness as some kind of natural fact, when really it is a sci-fi fantasy, not proven by science. We think that Mars colonialism is a real thing and it is a frontier of rocket engineering rather than biology. And in a way sci-fi is to blame for it. So if we acknowledge that it is those that control the fantasy. Control the future. How we would like them, us to wield that fantasy. Dystopia is one of the two most popular ways to think about the future. But the issue with that is that it's not any more caution tale. Regurgitation of doom and gloom has become A reason to disengage. If we believe that the future is doomed and there's nothing we can do about it, well, then we do nothing about it, but also possibly worse. It becomes a product roadmap because there will always be those that will want to make money, not just as the world burns but also by setting the world on fire and so utopias are oppositioned as the answer to dystopianism, but historically they have been deeply homogenous and exclusionary. In a way, if disabled or elderly people still exist? Is it even utopia? And what does it take? What kind of ends justify the means? Right? So it's not really a binary, it's two reverse sides of the same coin. Every historical utopia. Has been somebody else's dystopia and today's techno utopian propositions are not really that different. Famous venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen I unironically quotes. Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, who was an author of Futurist manifesto, but also of fascist manifesto and an ideologue of Mussolini. So it's not that. We should not be critical, as again, Mark Andresen identifies tech ethicists and tech criticists as the enemies of progress in his techno optimist manifesto. I believe that to think that what we currently have is not the best thing that we can have is actually the most optimistic approach. So when we acknowledge the power of fiction, future fiction specifically. When we try to apply that world design strategy to real world challenges, what are the traps we shouldn't fall into? And so, the first trap is really nostalgia. It's trying to return to the past rather than learn from it. Our capacity for memory, for remembering our past, did not evolve to remember the past, but really to make better future decisions. But in a way, we cannot succumb to technos solutionism, techno fetishism, or dare I say, even technocultism. In this battle today between scientists and Tedros, we must prioritize science, technology, is actually a material manifestation and outflow of scientific research. Without that fundamental science. Innovation stops happening. So always take the side of a scientists that are telling you inconvenient truths. Now, I find a very interesting real world example of these two different story world designs. Taken by the government, are the Project 2025 versus Made in China 2025. One tries to escape material reality, the other leans into it. And the emerging common point between religious extremists in the Western world and many of its cultists is that they both believe in the fantasy oft times coming. Bought brought by religious rapture or AI god slash demon, A nerd rapture. The most striking difference for me between what the most powerful people in America versus China pronounced about the future is that in the former they want to escape the body in favor of matrix mind uploading. They want to escape the earth in favor of Mars colonialism and in the other, it's about leaning in this contextual reality of the land. With the millennial lineage before and after, and I think it's so important to lean into that reality as inconvenient as it is and sure ecological civilization might seem like a distant dream. But surely it is more realistic than Mars as the plan B. Now, over the long term control of delusional voices, Can really save us from that social fracturing. The answer to that is finding a way to awaken our genuine scientific curiosity and reinforce information literacy. The change we need is not going to happen overnight, but we start with identifying our shared yes visions and informed hope is key in that. Informed hope is not doing something because it's easy. But because I we understand the scope of the challenges and we embrace this amazing opportunity to learn. So what if the future could be everything we hope for. But not what we were told to expect. Narratives are not really enough anymore. There were beautiful narratives put out with the great reset of 15 Minute City. And what happened? These think tank manifestos got. Misinterpreted. And became a fodder to conspiracies that flooded YouTube. So putting out words, putting out manifestos, putting out narratives is not enough. We need to bring people into that world that we say we are designing or making policy to words. We need to flesh it out visually sensorially. And so we could really be learning from the best techniques of cier world building to design future scenarios and world prototypes beyond these finite visions of utopia and dystopia and find insights in the edges that we have overlooked. And could the future actually be? What we hope for. But so very different to what sci-fi conditioned us to be, to believe. Maybe it's not about the flying cars. As replacement of the Uber for the uber rich, but about rewilding city skies. Now, that does not mean that we should be Luddite and abandon technological research or scientific developments. It's about thinking how these technologies, these innovations serve real utilities. There will be plenty need for flying cars for emergency services, disaster leave, etc. etc. etc. So my proposition for the practical guides beyond utopianism and dystopianism is protopia. Now protopia differently than utopia and dystopia is more of a process than a destination. And instead of being this vague middle ground between the two, it is imagination beyond it, understanding status quo. But not resigning to it. It is meant to be expanded and questioned. It is not a better future built through magical tech, but upon evolved values assisted by the bleeding edge scientific research and technological development. And could we try and imagine this path to a future that is not merely sustainable but actually regenerative. Sustainability is not exciting for the people, right? It just feels like ah. Another Lecture I need to, to listen through, right? But when we propose something that is regenerative, that offers new way of doing things, when we lean into the embodiment, rather than disembodiment. We might find something joyful to strive for and joy and imagination is where it all begins. So this is a bit of a cheat sheet, the six principles that are not meant to be considered as some kind of hierarchical mahos pyramid of needs, but really, As interlinked circles to be thought of as together plurality. What if instead of tolerance we fostered curiosity into dependence? What if we acknowledge that the real strength is not in not needing others but about weaving these resilient systems, regeneration, what if we moved past. User centric, human centric into life centered design and recognize how biology is not this kind of strain which should transcend but infinite source for inspiration. Creative forcing. What if we assume that Creativity is the beginning of a solution to all problems. Sensory embodiment, again, recognizing how future doesn't happen to technology because technology, but to our bodies and to our bodies and spiritual fulfillment, right? Because in the absence of that, conspiracies and cultism rises. So I know I threw a lot of big ideas at you, but I hope that protopian story world design could become this cheat sheet whenever you approach any project that you're working on. Not specifically something that requires immediate foresight practice because none of us in this room. Is doing technology or marketing or business. With every action, no matter how big or small, we are shaping the future. But the future also gets shaped by our apathy. So this is an opportunity to get curious, to learn, to disentangle ourselves from a sci-fi biases we've been conditioned to, but also see the power of creatives and imagers. that have inspired us. That have inspired some of the world's most powerful people to design towards a particular future. And maybe we need new inspiration. Maybe all of us need to become future story world designers. Thank you.

Ole Scheeren believes great architecture is built upon stories—not just the ones we climb but the ones we tell ourselves about our futures. The job of the architect isn’t simply to design physical structures. It’s to imagine worlds, to give people the freedom to go about their lives in a meaningful way. Architects don’t just draw structures; they shape how people move, how they meet, how they see the city and themselves. In this conversation, we'll explore Scheeren's variation on Louis Sullivan's oft-cited maxim: "form follows function.” 

Form / Fiction × Flux

From the tangible tools we interact with daily to inter-species design thinking and global conservation efforts, a design leader at one of the world’s largest tech companies explains how investing in education, partnering with organizations that advance society, and expanding our imagination beyond human-centered design creates the foundation for prototyping our collective future.

From Everyday AI to Global Impact

You too, well you 3. It's gonna be a tough act to follow. Next, let's see how AI has become increasingly embodied into our daily lives. I'll be chatting with the VP of design at Microsoft AI, Liz Dancio. Liz has built a remarkable career spanning design, education, media, and technology at Microsoft AI. She works on the works on the first consumer AI product that became co-pilot, specializing in AI and search. She oversees the content design team for. Of consumer facing products and behind the scenes model fine tuning and evaluation and so much more. She'll guide us on Microsoft's journey from developing the AI that we use every day to its transformative potential for society. Please join me in welcoming Liz Danzigo. Come sit, come join. You really have had such an unusual career. We're going to talk about nonlinearity later today, but you really do embody it, um, spanning design and journalism and media where my heart lives, um, education. And I like to think of you as a person that has a heart for social impact but a brain for strategic design thinking with real business impacts. And as a result, I think you have an unusual role at Microsoft which we're going to dig into today. um, but I do want to flag for the purposes of this conversation, in addition to the things that you do all day, we're going to also be turning our way, our attention away from the chat and the interfaces and the search and all the tools that we use and debate and work. about and wonder about. I'm on to AI and you have a beautiful phrase for this a global material for possibility and the work that you're doing and you've done to prepare students and your Microsoft colleagues, clients, partners and friends to imagine that better world. But to understand the context, let's start with your role at Microsoft. You have a very, very big job, and I struggle to sometimes wrap my mind around what it is you actually do all day for the last 3 years. Yes, so well thank you, thank you so much for the introduction and for um for being here, um, with, uh, with all of us and I am, I struggle to think about what my, my role is. Microsoft is a very large place uh I I work in an. Or within Microsoft called Microsoft AI, which is between 8 and 9000 people and uh believe it or not, it feels like a very small community in the way that we support each other and show up for one another. Um, my role is to lead the design team and the content design team and the content design team is a group of writers of kind of UX writers and also writers that fine tune and evaluate the model, uh, directly as well. Most of our work is either with generative search, um, new forms of search, looking at search across Microsoft platforms and services, but also looking at how copilot shows up directly to the consumer. And so it's in contrast to how co-pilot might show up in one's work on the enterprise side we're going sort of directly to the consumer in their everyday life, um, on the streets, etc. So, um, every time we use these tools, it's your, it's you and your team work that we're seeing. I'm, I'm really behind at all. That's true. No, no, it really, the, the search search really does, however, search and co-pilot together, which is a topic of great interest, uh. Internally, uh, work together and really are in many different places, so the team is quite spectacular. I want to dig into your history a little bit because you came to Microsoft, as our friend Liam Neeson would say, with a very specific set of skills. Um, and you were, which I think is relevant as we'll we'll continue our conversation, specifically in education. Can you talk to us about what you were doing right before you got to Microsoft AI, right? So about almost 20 years ago I had the opportunity to found a new kind of graduate program which became something called the MFA and Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. City and I led that program uh for that time looking at how to keep students who are graduating from this 2 year program what we called about 3 to 5 years ahead of the industry by the time they graduated so many of the faculty, if not 100% of the faculty at the time were what we call adjunct, so not full time there, but also. Within the profession, bringing the skills of the profession into academia, bringing the the sort of learnings and new ways of thinking from academia out to the profession, and then creating a curriculum that would keep people ahead by the time they graduated, take take some foresight and experimentation, failures and lots of learning that I do think that I've brought back into the work of Microsoft alongside of that I. Was the vice president of design and then SVP of digital at NPR leading their product team so thinking about how media and designing with and alongside the public uh made sense in terms of the the longitudinal value of like journalism and the integrity of how journalism shows up to people in their homes and their businesses and their cars. in their podcasts, so that was also something that I was doing right before Microsoft. So taking those two sort of media and journalism, designing for the public, not designing for the public, designing with and alongside the public and and education, long career and sort of education and thinking about that and bringing them together really serves us well in an organization as large as Microsoft working. Um, with Microsoft AI in a space that is new every single day, that's my that that would lead me to my next question in a space that's moving that quickly, would it take us behind the scenes on how you stay prepared? Yeah, well, uh, showing up at places like this, learning about what's happening from multiple perspectives, and then thinking about how you bring those multiple perspectives back into the studio. Uh, so creating the conditions for the team to have success that includes um. Understanding what the goal is for our studio. So this year, even though our name is Microsoft AI, that doesn't mean despite the conversation earlier about naming things and sort of alongside of that doesn't mean that everyone is AI native. So we created a goal for our organization that every person in the studio will become AI Native by the end of the fiscal year. And so, as you all know, you can't just say something to make it true. You have to put in place conditions for that to be successful. So my colleague and I, Jess Holbrook started something that we're calling the Royal Academy of AI. Um, and that it's a pretty good name. That place is uh the name is a bit tongue in cheek, uh, but it's supposed to have a serious impact on the way that people are able to approach AI and AI tooling, AI and processes and the workflow. It has goals of staying curious. Commitment to craft and continuous learning and it does it by time boxing the way that we think about it week to week. So we created an overall curriculum. We brought in professors who are peers of the colleagues that we have so that they. The accessibility of the knowledge felt achievable for people and then we allowed people to only work in that space that we allotted so we gave people permission to be messy and to experiment and to do all that but then we said there's no assignments, there's no homework, there's no responsibility for them to think about it outside of those conditions and the response to it has been. Just tremendously positive and we're in the 4th month now, so it's relatively new. You are the first among the first to hear about it outside the walls of Microsoft AI, um, but the ways that's showing up in people's work. The product itself on their teams, the way that it's showing up in terms of communications and also just in terms of people feeling more satisfied and energized about the possibilities with AI has been tremendous anxious too, exactly lowers the bar of anxiety and maybe fear by allowing people to experiment with multiple tools. When we were prepping, you described a moment that would probably be familiar to many here where your new CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleiman, um, joined and found a. A set of products that weren't working as they should and a team that they probably felt, I don't want to put any words in your mouth but just still forming, right? A star still evolving um what, what, what was wrong and what was the fix? Yeah, in March 2024, so just the beginning of last year, Mustafa Soleiman came over to Microsoft, and he had a mandate in mind. So one, we were uniting under a single brand called Microsoft AI. So again, this naming just keeps coming up, doesn't it? It seems to be a thing creating this. Place culture, a way that we can talk about ourselves together and creating this idea that we are all focused on a Microsoft AI, so we're all focused on this idea of creating AI for humans but for the broader impact of society of the world, and he laid down three commitments for us trust, simplicity, and quality. And the way that he did that was by talking about it from the stage when we had town halls talking about it in his weekly emails every time you're in a small meeting with him reinforcing those commitments that we had, and they became ways that we could talk about our work and our processes and the what the goals that we had um individually across the products within Microsoft AI because we're multiple products under one umbrella. And so it became this incredibly kind of amazing uniting force that convened us and allowed us and empowered us to to sort of work together. It's not perfect um we're still we're still evolving, but what it's allowed us to do is work in a similar way, shared language, shared processes, um, and now we're all working on the same cycles we all have the same beginning. Of our process sort of end of the process cycle, so we're sort of in the same time zone, you know, in the same kind of work time zone, if you will, and it's just really transformed the way that we communicate with each other and the impact that we have in the market. Speaking of impact, let's talk about the social impact part of your life, which isn't part of your day job. You had some really interesting case studies, and these are things that people might not think that Microsoft would naturally have an affinity for, right? Yeah, so Microsoft is a large place, as I mentioned, as you all know, and throughout Microsoft there are many, many different teams and pockets that are working on social impact projects, some of which I've had the opportunity to work on in my time there so far. So one recent and yes, people don't often think about social impacts when they think about Microsoft, but what unites us all is our commitment to the. User whether the users, you know, at their, their, their office at their desk or working somewhere out in the wild um but that commit that commitment brings us together so Microsoft understands that the worker or the user has the information that we need to kind of conduct our business and likewise we have information that would empower workers and so about 2 years ago, the end of. 2023, so December 2023, Microsoft forged a partnership, the first of its kind with the AFL-CIO, which is the largest federation of labor unions in the United States, and what that meant was a commitment to three things. One, Microsoft would commit to being part of the ongoing education of workers for the labor unions to Microsoft. would agree to pitch and shape policy on behalf of the labor unions with their input, and 3, Microsoft would host and convene summits in situations where labor union workers and their representatives could inform the way that AI technology is rolling out. So this exchange of ideas is not unlike the work that we do at Microsoft AI where we're centering the human, we're centering the. Context in which that human is and then thinking about how to kind of create a two way kind of street so there's communication going both ways. What's incredibly pointing about this for me is that when you think about who's in labor unions, these are the people who touch the nuts and bolts of the companies where they work and investing in them, them with design thinking seems like a brilliant way to to to to influence the people who actually make things happen. Yeah, the idea of the worker voice being represented in the product, but also, as you're saying, making sure that they're empowered to have that to have that information, the ideas about what's happening and unfurling in the market is so. Important so that when they go back to the bargaining table, their everyday jobs, um, that the ways that they touch our everyday lives, they're gonna be informed worker center design, we are, we are, we just have about a minute left and that if there's so much more that you're doing. I, I was wondering, um, we've talked so much about this conference about the urgent need to prepare people to be fully human, to lead, navigate difference. Um, just as a sort of a parting thought, what have you learned about creating a fully, a truly effective team? Truly effective teams are like new communities that are forming right? They're they're little neighborhoods, uh, cities, you know, within their within their own right, and we talked a lot about architecture and urban planning, uh, here as well. So if you think about the intentional way you might go about forming a community, um, there's been a few things and there are many things. It's different with every community and every neighborhood, so you have to know the constituents. Um, but one, sort of clarity of purpose, making sure that that vision or the clarity of purpose within the team is clear to everyone and finding ways that are interesting and fun and meaningful and accessible to everyone to to kind of share those two, psychological safety, uh, for diverse ideas to make it out, people have to feel safe to voice them so making. So that that that psychological safety is there doing training, being approachable, creating safe space and 3 ambiguity, sort of leaning into the ambiguity and I think that's contingent upon having the culture to do it, but making sure that people feel empowered to kind of go into the ambiguity with uh with creativity to kind of bring bring uh. You know, clarity there. So I think those have been the 3. That's perfect. I'm so glad you're here. Be sure to ask her about Project Sparrow when you see her later and also with the elections but not politics. Liz, thank you so very much for being here. Congratulations on your great success. Thank you so much.

Traditional robots are usually pre-programmed with specific, repetitive tasks in controlled environments. The new wave of robots are embodied with AI to perceive, learn, and adapt autonomously through physical interaction with the unpredictable, real world. A chat with the  company that is innovatively mass-producing these new humanoids, one of which just topped Fortune China’s Best Design List.

Embodied AI, Oh My!

So both Autoflight and Everheart are on this year's China Fortune China best design list. Uh, a list we've been, um, publishing for 4 consecutive years. Uh, also on this year's list was a humanoid robot. Uh, from the our next company AGIO. This new wave of robots features machines no longer just pre-programmed with repetitive tasks. They are embodied with AI to learn and adapt in the real unpredictable world. Here to tell us more is AGIbot's chief marketing officer, Heng Qiu, in conversation with Clay Chandler. Please welcome them. Uh, thank you so much for joining us and, and welcome. Uh, this is a real treat. We've heard from companies large and small today. Yours is a relatively new startup. Tell us about AGIBott and when it was founded and where it's based, and how long it's been created. OK, so, uh, AGI bought a new company built in 2023, so less than 3 years, but we develop very, very fast. We think now we are already one of the leading companies in this area. Just as our company name, AGI bought means our target is to realize artificial general intelligence. Right, so in other words, these are robots that don't, you don't have to sit behind them with a remote control and steer them and show them where to go, but can, uh, navigate themselves, or do something like work in a warehouse, take a box off the shelf, bring it back to a truck, something like that, right? So you've got a bunch of different robot products. Can you tell us about the robot product line and how many different types of robots you're, you're manufacturing? OK, so in fact we have 3 series of humanoid robots. Uh, the first one we call it a series. This is a full-size humanoid robot. The, the height is 1. 3 m and the second series is called X series. It's a half size robot around 1.3 m. So it's a child height and the third one is a wheeled robot with a wheel. So move easily in the factory. So we have three series of humanoid robot and also we have dog robot do yeah, yeah, uh, really interesting, so, um. So the, the one that's kind of almost full size, that's the the A series, right? And the most sophisticated, most advanced one is the A20, that is, um, we have A2 X2 and the G2. These three series for yeah, for, for, for different scenario, yeah, and we were, we were chatting a little bit backstage about capabilities, but um. And you were saying that that the technology is really advancing very swiftly, that it changes every quarter, you'll have another series of robots out next year. What, what's changing? Tell, tell us what's progressing. Is it AI where the real innovation is, or is it, uh, is it something else? Uh, I think AI contribute a lot to the progress of humanoid robot. So for, for us, for AGI port, um. Um, strategy is one human, uh, one robot body plus 3 intelligence. You you understand for the hardware, we need the robot body and for the intelligence we need three types of intelligence. locomotion means for the movement, interaction, for talking, for gesture, and so on. And thirdly, the manipulation intelligence. So combine all these three kinds of intelligence, robot can really work, can provide. Productivity. So we combine all these together. Maybe that's something um special for us because not every robot company can do all this, can do all those things. Um, I mean the location challenge is an interesting one because it requires sensors responding to the visual signal, interpreting that, creating a map in its algorithmic brain, whatever that is, and, and then. And then responding to that, right, navigating the space that it it senses. Um, that seems really hard to me. OK, but I don't think that's the hardest part for a robot. Really, what's the hardest part? Um, just now we talk about like a locomotion interaction and manipulation. So for locomotion, maybe now you can see many company can do that dance, jump, and so on. You can see all kinds of videos on the internet, right? But for interaction. I think the level may be less than the locomotion level check the whole industry. For example, if only you make a conversation, maybe it's not so difficult, but you don't want to only talk with the radio. You want it to have a gesture, has a, OK, just like a human, so that makes things more difficult. Then talk about manipulation. You need to work as good as a human or even better than human. That's even more challenging. So I think manipulation intelligence is the hardest one in action, the second locomotion, maybe right now it's the easiest part. So I read a thing um in the news the other day. And, and maybe you can talk a little bit about this. It was about um Your robots, um, uh, I was an A2 robot that took a 3 day journey from Suzhou to the bound in Shanghai, yeah, more than 100 kilometers continuous working. Yeah, tell us, tell us about that. Was that hard? Um, yes, in fact, that's not easy, um. I want to talk about several parts. So first, uh, for the stability, you know, even for a human work more than 100 kg, you will feel very tired and maybe in the beginning, no problem, but at the end, maybe you feel uneasy or even. For, for, for now, maybe, but for a robots our robot, no problem. And also on the way you need to judge where to Avo is an obstacle, right, because you know so long distance, there are many, many different kinds of environment and difficult situation he needed to handle. And also, uh, since when you walk such a long distance, you need to work at a daytime and at nighttime for different scenario for outdoor scenario, it can handle. So in fact it's not easy. Yeah, it's not easy at all and the and the terrain, this was on public streets, right? It was on roadsides and sidewalks and had to navigate intersections and It sounds very, uh, very complicated. How about the battery for that longer trip? Uh, we change the battery, um, in a hot swap way because when you, it has inner battery, right, when you change the the the big one, it can still stand there. So you need them to do some uh complex operation, just a stand change and then work again. I say it's a kind of battery battery swapping, um, I've, I've seen some really interesting videos of the A2 and it, um, you know, you talk about manipulation, the, uh, and motion, um. Apparently these things can do even very, I mean many things that we think nothing of that we think is very simple tasks as humans are very difficult for humanoid robots like for example, I've seen videos of it picking up an egg and knowing exactly the lightness of grip necessary to keep from crushing that uh egg, but how challenging is something like that. Um, OK, so during this kind of process, I think you need several key technology behind. One of course is the intelligence. It can grasp the, the egg and also we need the dexterous hand can have the sensor to feel how heavy. And what is the material of this egg because if it's very heavy, he needed to grasp tightly. If it's not so heavy can Not so tightly, so don't crush the egg. So both the sensing the the judgment and then manipulation needed to needed to be combined together. So in fact, of course, if only for egg, it can be optimized. But since our target is AGI, we are not for egg, right? We are not for Right, uh, bottle for everything we need to handle all these issues based on a lot of data based on big model, a model to handle all this. Yeah. And how will you train these robots to, to move, to do tasks? they train by watching humans perform tasks, or how will it, how will the training happen? Yeah, in fact, we have a robot school for each data collection center. And what is special for us is we combine three kinds of learning technology. The first one we call it imitation learning means there's a teacher hand by hand, remote control the robot to do something. So in this way, the robot imitate how people do this kind of a task. So this is for the imitation. Imitation learning accumulate high quality data for the robot to do something. Then with this data we can train the big model. But of course, the data volume is not enough because if you want a lot of data, you need a very long time and high cost. So we have the second one. The world model class seem too real. The the the methodology. So it means we build the world model to do the simulation. So with the just now imitation model learning, we get a lot of high quality data. With this data, we build a model in the world model simulation. And then we do millions of times the simulation to get enough data to trade the big model. Then the big model can work. Then we have the 3rd learning scenario. We have the Real world Reinforcement learning means the robot with a bigger model do. Try, make a mistake, adjust this scenario. Then during this process, he just like an internship student, as this work side do make some mistake, then change, adjust, then better, then adjust better. Then During not a long time, it can work perfect. So combine these three types of learning methodology, our robot can evolve very fast. Yeah. Fascinating. So you've got this, uh, robot university in Shanghai, you're training the robots, um, maybe only school, university, maybe to that. Um, when they, when they graduate, what kind of, uh, what kind of jobs do you envision them taking? What kind of sectors do you think humanoid robots will be most, most valuable? Yeah, in fact, now we have 8 scenarios that our robot can work and can get a salary. OK, means that he feels proud that this job is well done. I can get a salary, OK. 8 scenarios. The first one is for the uh reception. Like uh for the 48 uh automobile car shop, they should do the reception, do the guidance, and so on. That's the first task. And second is for commercial recreation, like a dance, sing and so on. And the third one is for intelligence uh uh manufacturing for some like um. Uh, consumer electronic production line. And the fourth one is for the logistic sorting. The package come, they turn the package to show the barcode to the scan camera to show to Beijing to Shanghai and so on. And the 5th is the security patrol like the dog. Uh, to see whether there's a fee for something like that and for internal, uh, for indoor scenario, we have the robot to check the data center, whether this battery is overheat or something like that. And the 6th 1 is for commercial cleaning. We have a cleaning machine for the big mall and something like that do the cleaning. And the 7th 1 is from the 7th and the 8th 1 for university. The first is the 7th 1 is the data connection for the big model training and the 8th 1 is for the education and research. They we use our robot for how to learn how to build a robot, how to train the robot, something like that. Pretty sizable set of markets. So can we meet an A2? Can we bring one out on stage? Yeah, yeah, sure, of course. OK. We have one waiting to join us in the wings here. How do we invite him out to the stage? There he is. He's about, you can see there's a heart on its screen. A heart, yes, there is. Does he have a name? Uh, yeah, his name is A2. Hello everyone. My name is AGI. I'm really delighted to be here in Macau. This is my first time attending a fortune event and I'm so happy to meet all of you. I hope you all have a wonderful day. Now, I'd like to present a short performance for you. Please enjoy this Tai Chi demonstration. There he is. Well, not quite Bruce Lee. Thanks. Have a nice day. Uh, I can see the audience like a robot better than us because he come they take photos, but they don't take photos for us, yeah. All right, yes, there he's he's leaving us. Navigates pretty well. Good sense of balance. So this is the same one for the more than 100 kg to Shanghai walk, yes. Wow, uh, that's fantastic. Um, really, uh, impressive, and we look forward to, uh, seeing future iterations, uh, of your, of your human robots. So, thank you very much for joining us. Yeah, thank you very much. The proudest thing I want to emphasize is that our robot is really working now, is getting cellular now, not like many, maybe other cases they are just. Shooting the videos. It's actually up and running. Yeah, great. Hangzhou, thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you.

China is at the forefront of a new wave of tech innovation aimed at elevating human well-being, accessibility, and connection. From the skies to the streets to the human body, pioneers from China’s most transformative tech sectors share how they are not just imagining the future but building it today.

Spotlight on China Tech: The Leap Into Every Day Futurism

In this part of the world, China is riding high on a wave of tech innovation. What we used to imagine being built for skies, streets, or the human body. Uh, in the future, is actually already being used today. Joining me today are speakers from two pioneering companies in these sectors. Callenie is a senior vice president at Autoflight, which designs electric, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or as we know, Eveto. Yan Hua is director and CEO Everheart Medical Device, which makes artificial hearts. So please join me in welcoming them. Let's start with the sky. So Kellen, can you briefly explain to us what EV tolls are and how they're fundamentally different from, let's say helicopters. Oh, thank you, thank you. I'm very honored to be invited. The EVO stands for Electric vertical takeoff and landing. As you can see from this video, so it takes off like a helicopter and then fly like an airplane. It's 100% electric, electric, 100% electric, carbon zero. And it's a lot quieter compared with a helicopter and it's fully autonomous, you know, sometimes we need a pilot, but it's capable of fully autonomous flight. So it's vertical takeoff and landing. It doesn't need a runway, can be unmanned and can be piloted as well. Right. So what key factors do you think have prepared Chinese companies like, like Autoflight to become leading forces in this sector? First of all, China has a very good basis for the electric vehicle. So we've got a very mature technology, we've got a very powerful supply, and we've got a huge amount of talents actually accumulated during all the past 10 or 20 years of the EV. So that's our stretch. And then that can be all used to design and develop a good electronic vertical tele landing aircraft. Right. Let's move from the sky to the human body. So Hua, uh, your company makes artificial hearts, which in fact is a pump that's planted into human body. So how does it work? Yeah, um, yeah, actually, everybody knows that for decades, you know, the China innovation, um, especially in the healthcare market has been perceived as a cheap copycat, um, but now it's different. Um, China has made ourselves to the second largest developer of new drugs, including road curing cancer. And one of the most notable success we have made in medical device, in fact, is what I'm going to share with you with a short video about how we use artificial heart to cure the severe heart failures. So if you look at the screen, there's a video showing how it works. Uh, in fact, you know, um, you know, everybody knows that our heart, we have 4 chambers, we have left atrium. Right atrium, left ventricular, right, right ventricular. So when the heart fails, in fact, you know, the, our left ventricular was not able to pump enough blood to your body. So, um, actually our patient got to, you know, um, you know, eventually face a death because your body was starving for, you know, oxygen and the nutrition and the artificial heart. In fact, it's not a replacement of your heart. In fact, the professional name is left ventricular assisted device. So we have an assistant in middle of the name, meaning that it's actually build a bypass um blood flow to actually so the pump in fact, um, suck, you know, the blood from the tip of your left ventricular and the spin back to the aorta and the Go over to your body. So for that, you know, uh, sense, so it's not a replacement, it's in fact a support. So your company is one of the only two companies in the whole world that makes such advanced medical device. What key innovation do you think, um, enables you to stand shoulder to shoulder with international competitors? Yeah, that's a very good question. In fact, there is a lot of like perspective on difficulty to conquer, but I think one of the most remarkable thing we made in our design is that, you know, imagine this pump, basically it's a titanium pump. So, um it's actually spinning a very high speed. How to maintain that, you know, they can pump enough blood that healthy people need at the same time not damage your blood cells. That much. I think that's something that we um that's part of the major kind of the um technology barrier we conquered. So just for your information, ever for our products, in fact, we actually achieved the highest blood volume, which is 20 L per minute, which is like a double of our international tier at the lowest speed in the world, which is half of the speed of our international players. So, Actually, um, with that world record, we actually, uh, we are the first one to get approved in China. We are so far the one of the two, you know, brands, um, to get the destination therapy approval, which means that the patient can wear this product lifelong, right? Very very delicate balance to keep. So uh back to Kellen, uh, what are the most commercially viable and immediate, uh, use cases for Evitos? See, the whole purpose of this EB to actually transforming uh how goods are moving and how people are moving. So it's all about mobility. As you can see from this video, we also have emergency rescue, emergency response, and our main focus are actually like this, this video actually shows that the first world's first large scale to offshore oil platform transportation, actually transport like 200 to 300 kg of fresh food tools to the to the offshore oil platforms. And this actually video shows the world's first large scale. to cross city over land air express. So actually trans uh transporting the fresh food and also the high-end uh SF Express curate emails. So basically, that's all the uh user cases you can see, but our final game is to walk to the people's actual mobility to actually resolve the issues with traffic jams and all the other things, and to make sure that people are actually moving. As flexible as point to point in the future, but through the air, not over the land. So moving people as well as good. So how is design thinking embedded into your product development, considering the user experience, safety, and aesthetics? OK, so basically this uh actually is designed as what we call lift and cruise configuration. So basically it has 10 lifting motors and propellers and 3 pushers. And there were lots of redundancy designed in terms of providing the safety. For example, there's a very interesting factor called electronic parachute. So basically, why, why this aircraft is cruising like a bird, and then if it sort of encounters very strong crosswind. And then the lifting propellers will kick off immediately to actually make sure that the horses and then the pilot can actually land the aircraft wherever he likes as an emergency. This is only one example. Saty is. Um, so, uh, we're here a lot of talking these days about human machine, um, bio biosis. So symbiosis, what is your take on this symbiotic relationship where the body and the device actually work in partnership. We've, we've heard remarkable cases uh where your patients recover so well with the devices, they actually eventually they can remove the device. Yeah, that's a very good question. In fact, um, um, actually, unlike the other panelists, um, Mr. Xie's product, it's actually help humanity to extend, you know, or extended our, you know, reach to the outside world, uh, in fact, you know, our product, I guess everyone's in the healthcare products is in fact to help to reach inside of your body to more like a micro world. So when we talk about the symbiotic relationship, I think um as a healthcare practitioner, in fact, I think fundamental, first fundamental thing we need to resolve is, in fact, you know, the how to make sure that titanium pump actually can coexist with your body. Just for your information, um, without, uh, before actually the artificial heart came into board, I think people may understand that for severe. heart failure patient, the only solution is to get a heart transplant, but I think maybe a lot of you probably know that, you know, the heart transplant patients after procedures, they're gonna take the anti-rejection drugs for a lifelong time, which is extremely painful because to actually make sure the body doesn't attack the foreign, uh, you know, the heart organ. Uh, but with our artificial heart, um, you don't have to take any, you know, anti-rejection drugs at all. How we do that, number one, we will be very carefully choosing the right material. We choose the titanium, which is so far has proved to be the most stable and the most bio compatible um metals with a long term blood contact test. And also on top of that, over this titanium pump, we we actually cover all the surface. With a special coating, which is our own design, very original, one of a kind, and just imagine it like a ring coat, right? So when your blood cell pass through the surface. So actually that proof it um you can pass through um very smoothly without sticking on it because if you stick on it, in fact, that's gonna be a risk to cause, you know, the um thrombo thrombosis, which eventually will be stroke. And on top of that, in fact, another problem we should resolve is that how synchronize. So in fact, early this morning, you know, another speaker talked about, you know, amplifier idea, right? So our artificial heart in fact the work as an amplifier. So basically it's um so that the the the the pump by itself with our programming algorithm, they can, um, you know, sense of very weak and the bioelectricity signal and amplify it into a 5 times bigger, um 10 times bigger, your heartbeat, exactly, exactly, thank you. Um, so I think that's, that's remarkable. And I'll speak to your question about, you say a lot of the patient has been removed. In fact, I have, I do have a video to share some of your, um, are real patients, and some of them actually have been still wearing our products. Some of them have been removed and the subject is removed. In fact, you say that this the first patient in fact is from Xinjiang, he's actually wearing our product for 3 years. He is now subject to remove. And the reason is factor behind that, you know, why we can get him to remove eventually is in fact we our our product design enable it to create a real possible, you know, the blood uh blood flow, which means that you can feel the pulse, not only feel the heartbeat, which is not, nothing like you have seen, you know, Iron Man movie, right? Um, so and that kind of the, you know, pulse is very important because that give your, you know, Cardiac tissue and your muscle, your vessels, a regular press and like a massage or exercise to make sure the long term the electricity of the vessels and also give the patient a great comfort of the psychological, uh, you know, kind of comfort as patient can feel. I'm still have piece of my humanity in my body. I'm not turning myself into a silicon light, have human dignity and it just shows uh devices or machines can. Uh, enable instead of replacing, uh, our body parts. So Kellen, looking ahead 3 or 5 years, um, how do you envision, uh, technology eventually transforming the way people and goods move? Uh, for example, like in the Greater Bay Area, this is a perfect example because we have done the Shenzhen to Zhuhai trial route about a year ago. So, uh, spending only 20 minutes, uh, so we, we can travel from Shenzhen to Zhuhai, but instead, if you, if you go by rail, it takes you about 2.5 hours plus and this Greater Bay Area is is is a perfect example. Because they actually connect with so many busy cities with so huge population and very good economic growth. So, uh, in the future, maybe 3 to 5 years when the authority actually releases all the certificates and when, when our units or our competitors unit, they are actually being tried in many of the user studies and user cases, and then we finally moved into commercialization. And then you will see probably you can envision like thousands of this uh like EB2 aircraft flying above our head and and why very safely managed and monitor the noise, yes, yes, this is a very interesting question because we have measured it one of the good thing about this EVO, the electric vertical takeoff is because it doesn't have generators. have engines. So basically only the motor spins, so it doesn't have engine noise. So compared with traditional helicopter, we measured like over like 100 m distance in the multiopter mode is only like less than 70 decibels. And meanwhile, the, the, the helicopter is like up to about 95 to 100 decibels. There's about like 25 to 30 decibels less, that means. 1000 times less. So comparing with traditional helicopters. And during the cruising, so for example, if you cruise above like 200 m above your head, and basically on the ground, you barely notice because the noise level can be as low as 45 decibels. So basically you cannot hear or you cannot feel. So this is the good thing about the the the quietness about this EB, yeah. Thank you. Uh, big thank you to both of you, uh, from redefining mobility to restoring the rhythm of life. The future is already here. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Rapidly changing technology is transforming corporate culture. What is the designer’s role in helping a company adopt change? How can designers look ahead to establish a direction and identify opportunities for growth and innovation? Hear from two experts, one a veteran educator, bilingual in both business and design, and the other, who revitalized a design program at IBM and revolutionized how almost 400,000 people worked.

Designing Corporate Cultural Change

How does a designer and a maker work together when they have to furnish large spaces under pressing deadlines and budgets? How do they balance between ready-made pieces versus customized ones? Hear from a principal at an internationally renowned architecture and interior design firm and the CEO of a company specializing in high-end furniture.

Customization at Scale: How Designers & Makers Collaborate

Now on some more places where we like to relax, restaurants, bars, and hotels. Our next conversation revolves around the dynamic relationship between designers and makers who furnish these spaces. Tina Norden is the managing partner of Konrad and Partners, the renowned architecture and interior design practice founded by Sir Terence Conran. Dyke Hironaka, CEO of Stella Works, heads up an international brand known for their contemporary high-end furniture. They discuss how they collaborate under time and budget constraints in the fast-paced hospitality industry and provide customization at scale to make their environment feel distinct, elegant, and evocative. Please welcome Tina Dyke and Tony Chambers for this session. Please join us. Hello again, everybody. I hope you're enjoying the sessions so far. We have a great one now, customization at scale in the hospitality industry. So I know we're all very familiar with enjoying the benefits of well designed hotels, restaurants and bars, but we're going to dig into the The making of such places and the complicated and nuanced industry that makes up that great industry. We are joined by Tina and Diske, and I thought it would be useful if we start with an introduction to your both of your companies, your businesses. Um, to give the background and the origin stories of who you are and what you're about. So I think let's start with you, Dia. Tell us about the origins of stellar works and what your unique selling points are. OK, thank you very much for inviting me for this event. So it's a great honor. So my name is Take Hironaka. I'm a CEO of Starbucks. So Starbucks is a Japanese owned furniture company based in Shanghai. And we have a mid-size factory co-owned with the French manufacturer. With about 120 workers. And 80 of his staff. So we also have sales offices in New York, London, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. So we learned two main businesses. Custom made furniture and the furniture collection. Each accounting for about half of our business. So we focus on the hospitality industry. Uh, business, uh, uh, business model is unique because we can provide affordable custom-made furniture for hospital project. While also offering our own original brand. Our production aim to achieve the finest furniture, furniture through a Japanese quality management system. French technology. And Chinese craftsmanship. So this is a brief introduction for Andy, from what I've known of the brand for many years, 2012, is that right? the brand was founded? Yes, brand, it started from 2012, yes, and you hinted at it, but I think it is so significant. Japanese origin, but headquartered and made in Shanghai in China, to this very, very high spec. And you brought in the French historical French cabinet maker Laval to bring in some of that know-how of making with training and using Chinese craftsmanship, and I think that made such an important statement to the design world that China does high quality at a time when there was a misconception that it only produced lower quality. So I think it's a significant. Message, but also a combination of three different cultures and methods of know-how. And here's some examples of the hospitality work you've done and your business, as you said again, is twofold. You have a collection where you work with great designers globally, but you have the bespoke elements where you make furniture. Specifically for particular projects and work with great design companies such as Conran and Partners and Tina here. So Tina Tell us about the rich history. And the origin story of Conran and Partners and of course your charismatic and hugely influential founder Terrence Conran. Absolutely. So, um, we're an architecture and design practice, um, born in London about 40 years ago, and founded by Sir Terence Conan, who was actually a furniture designer and fabric designer to start off with. So as a studio, I think we have very great empathy and understanding and respect for furniture design and for the detail and craftsmanship that goes into that. And from that, we've gone on to design restaurants, of course, then hotels, residential, etc. um, but we come from that kind of foundation of kind of touching things, making things, and, and, and understanding how people utilize their space. Um, about 7 years ago we opened a studio in Hong Kong, and we've always done a lot of work in Asia. That's kind of where our heart lies in many ways, starting off in Japan and then coming into Hong Kong and the kind of greater Far Eastern region really, um which I'm looking after and I have a fantastic team. In Hong Kong that supports me with that, but our studios very much work collaboratively. That's one of the themes today, of course, and between London and Hong Kong, and we like the fact that we get the kind of the European design houses and Asian heart kind of vibe, and that means that we can address briefs in both continents really that we're operating in, you know, very carefully and with a lot of thought and with a lot of understanding of how people want to kind of engage with their spaces and how they wish to live. So, um, most of the projects that, that I'm sharing with you today are actually based here in Asia because we felt that that was most relevant, um, and all of them are of a scale that we can really kind of craft the environment and really kind of pay attention to how people engage with their spaces. Um, and something that was said earlier about OA actually, um, really resonated where he was talking about architecture actually ultimately creates spaces for people and I think that is. Even more true for interior architecture that we I mostly work in um but really it's about a people-centric experience and of course technology helps us getting there but fundamentally it's about what you see and what. It's about people. It's about the experience that people have and the huge influence that design. And furniture in particular and environment has on you as a as a customer. These we whizzed through some beautiful projects again. These last four are collaborations you have Stellar works and Tina have done together. There's 4 images here and this is where I think is a moment where I think it would be useful to really explain how this relationship works and how this collab collaborative process works. A hotel project or a restaurant or a bar. How, what is the origin of that? Where's the procurement? Is it the owner of the place? Is it another department? is it is it who starts first? Is it the designer that then approaches a manufacturer such as Silhouette? Is it the other way around? Is it somewhere in between the two? I mean, the ideal case scenario should be that the vision originates with the designer. Um, and that we then collaborate closely with the people making it, so that would be the kind of the, the ideal story if you like, but there is a dark horse called procurement in our industry that I think all of us as designers are very much familiar with and the, the, the, the process is not often as linear as we would like it to be, um, and, and at times we even get kind of slightly cut out of that and something comes out on the other side that Wasn't really what we were expecting. So the idea, the ideal route really is that there is a close collaboration between the people designing and the people making and then of course also understanding what the financial aspects of that might be because that's where procurement of course comes in and that's where sometimes things can go slightly awry. And elaborate on the issues with that. You have a vision that may be the person who's commissioned you has a vision, but then there's an intermediary that might Cut this vision. That's right. I mean, basically, you know, I think every designer will understand what I'm talking about, you know, we designed something that of course needs to be built and there's a cost attached to that and that at times it's, it's difficult for us to, to estimate because different countries do things differently. Procurement works different, differently, you know, some things are more expensive in some countries that are cheaper somewhere else. So it's a difficult one for us to, to, to fully gauge. And also, quite often we're not necessarily being told what the budget of a project is, uh, which seems crazy, but it does happen more often than you think. So we are often in a situation where we are over budget, you know, the dreaded VE that happens, and how do we make things happen according to our vision? That's where procurement comes in, purchasing things. That's what procurement is basically, um, and, and often that's done by agencies, sometimes it's done by by the clients in-house, but Obviously these are money people and um you know, if you have many people that have an understanding of design, then you're, you're good. If you have many people that that don't, then you end up with something, well, this is a chair, what's the problem? And when there's a big difference between this chair and this chair and how it's made and how it's crafted and how it lasts. And do you think we're still in a d scale or you know both, we're still in a period where there needs to be more education on the value of good design and the effects and the positive value that good design has to prevent this potential problem of the person involved with procurement not really appreciating it and cutting costs, I think, you know. The bigger, uh, bigger projects, so, you know, they are focusing on the budget control. So, of course, you know, everybody wants to have a good quality of space and also furniture. But yeah, so because of the, you know, budget issues, so you know. Sometimes uh designer don't know, don't know. So who is the manufacturer? And there's a very small communication between manufacturer like us and then designer, but we believe, you know, to have a better quality in a product that in a communication is very, you know, very much needed. So. Yeah, that's something we need to improve. So yeah, and it's not just aesthetics, of course, it's it's efficiency, longevity of the product. I mean, to me that must be, it seems it would be an easier message to communicate, but again there are different complications of I mean, projects are very complex, you know, and, and the type of projects that we all kind of get involved in hotels, for example, you know, we said earlier, 5 years, 7 years until the hotel completes, it's a very complex kind of product. And so you know there are so many factors that come into that and one of them is that often you have people investing in the hotel that maybe are not going to be staying involved for a very long time. So what that means is that there's the capital investment when you're building something and there's a life cycle cost. And I think nowadays, particularly when you think about environmental concerns, we should be thinking about life cycle costs. So if you're spending a bit more money on good quality furniture, flooring, whatever it might be. Arguably it should last a lot longer and so it's much better value for money. It's better for the environment. You don't have to replace it very quickly, all of these good things. But of course if you have an investor who's mostly interested in producing the hotel, whatever it might be, the asset, and then selling it, they won't be so interested in the life cycle costs because that's someone else's concern. And I think what we need to do as an industry, talk a lot more about those different aspects and about the life cycle as well as the capex to make sure that we get true value for money in our project. And you see that as well, this, this issue you are producing furniture that has a life, a long life cycle that is core to what the brand is about, but you find issues where maybe people are not appreciated and maybe want quicker change. Yeah, so if you, you know, the owner or procurement company just, you know, pick up the the cheapest manufacturer, so you know, who has less experience about engineering. So maybe you know the owner need to, you know, uh uh pay a lot of money for maintenance or maybe even they need to change 3 times in the 10 years. So we need to think about, you know, the, the life, you know, the long life of the product. So this is a, you know, a good for benefit for the owner side also. And of course it reminds me there's the thorny issue of cheap copies, which is an eternal issue with design. Again, is that how do you convince a client, a procurement department that Stick to originality, invest in innovation. We need new things and better things. Tina, is that an issue you face? I mean, we, we try and have the conversation with our clients right at the beginning. Are we buying furniture or are we making furniture? It's a very, very important conversation and you know, often that's avoided. So we try and understand that at the beginning. If we are specifying furniture, then, you know, the rangers, for example, you saw some of the projects there that were pieces of furniture that can be bought off the shelf. The joy for us as designers is it's done. It's a chair that's designed that's comfortable. Someone tested it. Some worked on it for years to get to that point. We don't need to worry about it. And when there's something that's made bespoke, there's a lot to worry about because there's a huge process we need to go to to make sure that that particular chair is equally as good and equally as comfortable. And that's where, of course, you know, manufacturers like Dasu come in because they can help us as designers when we're busy doing everything else around it and to actually focus in on that. and making sure that the pieces that we design can actually be build um are affordable and are comfortable and all of those kind of. So this is where your relationship is key. The designer with the manufacturer, you have a concept, you have a vision, you know how things are made as well, but there's an expertise here with a, with a company like Cella works and Ice G um, to ensure that that new piece of furniture. Stands the test of time and is steady. Now, we are talking about the future, future tense and prototyping. The future and AI, of course. I know it's a difficult area in the creative industries, but for you. You are using AI workflows to help, particularly in this area, I think where it's an engineering problems. Is that right? Uh, so actually, you know, to be honest, our industry is quite behind about this kind of, you know, uh, technology, but, you know, me personally, I want to try to use AI for engineering part. So for instance, You know, we have a lot of uh custom made projects. Every single hotel project, you know, there's a lot of, you know, 100 to 200 pieces of different type of furniture. But every furniture we design, you know, uh, we, we need to do the make a drawing in a fast time for this only one chair or, you know, cabinet or something. So, uh, but you know, we have a lot of archives. You know, we designed a lot in the past, but if AI can use this kind of archive and study and then help to to uh to do the engineering, so that makes more uh helpful for designer also and then for us, you know. So the for the project you know timeline is also one of the big issues. So if it can help, so time will be more shortened. So give us an average, an average timeline for, for example, one hotel, uh, 200 pieces to make a, you know, all short short drawing, maybe it takes 1 month to maybe 45 days. But it's quite long, very, very long time actually, 45, yeah, but yeah, so, but if you use AI maybe we can, you know, shorten this time so. So it's, it's helping you. A is helping you on those more practical behind the scenes way in the design industry there is an anxiety about AI, about again sophisticated copies being able to design, but you have strong opinions on that, I think, you know, I think it was actually said very eloquently this morning already and people talked about, you know, what AI can do for us and where humans are still very, very important, and I completely. Support that. I think there is something about the human touch and about understanding how we like to use our spaces, how we enjoy space, how we perceive spaces that that will always be there, but AI should be something that can assist us getting to that point quicker because that's what we all need to do. There's a lot of kind of, you know, pressure on fees. There's a lot of pressure on programs. So you know, that's where we as designers, where we like to procrastinate and think about things for a very long time and kind of get it just right, where we can get some help in doing things. And I'm talking probably more about the not menial tasks, but the task that can, you know, that that that take a long time but don't necessarily need ultimate creativity if that makes sense. Research is one of them, adjusting things, you know, three dimensionalizing things, you know, looking at, you know, pieces we're designing in three dimensions, you know, quickly and fast. That's kind of that's that's where we're really excited to kind of and I would imagine where you are communicating a concept. Absolutely, even though, you know, presentation. In particular, you know, I found that if you can't present in person, you're already on the back foot, you know, it's great doing things via VC, but there's nothing better than being in a room with people, seeing someone's face, seeing someone's reaction. They're starting to play on their phone. They're clearly bored. You've got to move on. You can't see that on a VC. So I think that kind of human interaction, particularly in the design process, is really, really important, and that of course feeds also into working with, you know, our various partners and our, you know, our, our makers and, and, and, you know, furniture designers. And looking to the future on a more practical level and avoiding not necessarily technology plans for you to in the near future, are you working on more projects. We see 4 beautiful ones there, but is there an expansion? Are you after today, will you be knuckling down and thinking of projects for the future? Uh, for me, so, you know, as an Asian furniture manufacturer, so, uh, actually, uh, let's say, uh, in the world hotel project, around 80%, uh, furniture is coming from Asia. To the hotel process in the world and then within that maybe 80% is being made in Asia in Asia, yeah, yeah, and then so I don't have a, you know, specific number, but I feel that around half or more than half is a copy. Unfortunately, but you know, if we, uh, you know, we have an attitude that we Believe design is a value, you know, so then, you know, a lot of the uh manufacturer in China or Vietnam, they, if they realize, uh, you know, designs are more important for their business, so I think, you know, this copy issue will be decreased in future. So this is something I want to contribute. So is this your mission to communicate? Yes, the value of Not only well designed products, but very well made product is good for business, and I think that's a great message to end on. Thank you very much for sharing your insights on this beautiful world of hospitality and restaurants, bars, and hotels, and how you collaborate together to get the best results. So thank you so much, Tina and Dike. Thank you.

AI is taking aim at the hidden workplace inefficiencies that slow companies down —from automating routine and repetitive tasks to generating insights to streamline decision-making. But how does this actually change businesses, and what becomes possible when teams finally get their time back? Executives from leading tech platforms explain how companies can use AI to provide intelligent document processing, create consistent step-by-step guides for staff onboarding, and better recruit and retain employees. What’s actually working? What do leaders get wrong about increasing productivity? Where does human judgment still matter most?

Reworking Work

So you just heard there, AI promises to end some aspects of drudge work at the office, solving inefficiencies by automating repetitive tasks and redesigning the company workflow. But how will that transform the way businesses operate day to day? Joining us next are executives from two companies that are taking on the big challenge of reworking the way we work. Scribe is a firm that uses AI to create consistent step by step guides. For staff on boarding as well as document complex operational processes within companies, and GoodNotes is a note taking app with AI enabled digital capabilities that was named Apple's 2022 iPad app of the year. Joining us are Joseph Linn, AI champion lead of Goodotes, and Jennifer Smith, CEO of Scribe, who will be participating virtually. They will be interviewed by Fortune's editorial director for live Media, Kristen Stoller. All right, good morning everyone. Joseph, thank you so much for joining me and we have Jennifer here all the way from California. Thank you for being here. So I want to start off by getting a sense of the problems both of you were trying to solve when you started your companies, when they started, and how you are actually solving them now. Jennifer, let's start with you. There's a joke in Silicon Valley that every company wants to change the world. We want to change how the world works. So if you think about how most people spend their 9 to 5 right now, it's a gross misallocation of time and talent, and I would. The most powerful force in the universe is human potential, what people are able to do, and so we wanted to make it that when people show up to do work they are doing their best, highest calling. Hm, very cool. And explain to us exactly how scribe works. Subscribe will watch experts do work like people do the things they normally know how to do every single day and it'll automatically capture that know-how and turn it into a bunch of different formats. The basic primitive is a step by step guide with screen. Shots and instructions on how do I do this process so you've now essentially like sucked out of somebody's head what they know how to do like the true knowledge where the rubber meets the road. What am I doing when I'm fingers on keyboard every day trying to create value for this team, this company. And now I'm making it in a format that we can deliver directly to a colleague, a client, a customer, anybody else when they're going to do that same workflow, they'll now do it as good as that expert the first time they do it every time they do it. They're basically making knowledge like completely fluid across a team or across an organization, so no longer having to have someone just sit next to someone and and watch physically. Yeah, which happens a lot, right? We we're replacing the proverbial shoulder tapping or the quick zoom link share or Slack message of, hey, can you just show me how to do this thing? We're trying to make it seamless and automatic across everybody. Very cool. And Joseph, what about you? Good notes before I start, can I just say I also use Scribe and I'm a huge because documentation is so important to being able to leverage AI effectively. So what Goodnos is trying to do is we want to build the best medium for human AI collaboration. Think about it. So the pri primary way we use AI is through chatbots, but chatbots, we have to be able to do something better. Than that, right? We are now at the Nokia 3310 era of AI and then we believe the future of AI interaction has to be much more intuitive, much more pleasurable. So, um, good notes, we are a handwriting stylist-based. A and then we believe there is a lot of undiscovered richness to be found in trying to go for a stylus and voice-based AI workflow. And who are your users? Is it companies, certain types of people, who are you seeing most often using it? Students, teachers, uh, architects, uh, crime scene investigators, people of all walks of life. So imagine you're an architect, you're walking through the site with your civil engineer and you start the transcription, right? So that your discussion is captured and that will be a minute. At the same time you import the PDF of your site plan, you mark. It up, you scribble things in the margins, right, and then something doesn't look right, so you just snap a picture and then you can scribble another sticky note and then when you are done with the whole thing, you can just use the Ask good notes, good notes AI feature and then it'll just look at all the handwritings and the PDFs and the discussion and the everything else and give you a An answer based on that. So that's, I think, a more fluid natural way to use AI. Interesting. Now I'm going to ask you both a question that I asked this to a lot of CEOs, and they either laugh in my face or they shudder and get very scared when I ask this, but thank you both for bearing with me, which is how exactly are you quantifying success using AI right now? Is it how exactly are you measuring? Is it productivity? Is it revenue? What to you is a form of success here, Jennifer? Um, so I'll have two answers. One's internal how we measure it inscribe, and the second is how our customers are measuring using scribe. So our customers will apply it to whatever they're trying to do. The lowest common denominator, easiest way for folks to think about it is by time saving. Right, and so our customers have done really detailed time studies on their own, very obsessed with efficiency, uh, of what Scribe has meant for them, and they found they've saved anywhere between 35 to 42 hours per person per month of time so that's a work week a month of time back that they found for folks. Um, and then depending on the use case folks will say, hey, I'm trying to on board, uh, new hires faster, so how much faster am I able to ramp people or I'm trying to improve customer satisfaction. What's, uh, what's happening to my CSAT scores or I'm trying to drive error reduction. What's happening to my compliance or the accuracy of the tasks that are being done, um, and so that's really fun and interesting for us to work with different customers. We're trying. Achieve different things, um, and seeing how they measure that and helping them through that excellent for ourselves internally, oh, our internally we're, we're really fast growing company and so it's always how do we do more with very limited resources, um, because our biggest bottleneck is always hiring, um, and, uh, and having enough talent and so anything we can do to, you know, help our people just get more done in the day is a big win. Sounds like we have a lot of very similar problems, Jennifer. Uh, so internally we basically track AI based on time saved and tasks executed. So if in the past you used to have to do like a due diligence for procurement and then you need to look up all these things and then compile them into a report, nowadays you should be able to run one deep research query and that it should be done in no more than 5 minutes, right? And then, uh, at the same time, Uh, the number of tasks executed, if each task only takes 5 minutes now, you should be able to do more in the same given amount of time. So, uh, the marketing team, whereas in the past you might have 3 to 5 variations of social media copy, now you might be expected to generate 50 in the same span of time, and that goes to the other part, which is actually like AI. Really great, but it also really doesn't change the way business is done. We are trying to solve for the same pain points that customers have, and so a lot of the success metrics remain the same. Are users happy with our app? Are they saying good things about us? How many support tickets are we getting? How quickly can we resolve those queries? And all of those things, none of those things actually change. It's just that we expect the bar to be raised. Because now everyone is empowered with AI. That's a really good point because I, my next question was, you know, when humans are getting their time given back to them, what should they be doing instead? You said building, you know, more tickets, more marketing things, more social media company. Jennifer, is there something in your experience that you, you know, advise the companies who use your platform like, oh, they can be doing more X or more Y or where do you think humans still fit into the mix? I think humans will always maybe this is a contrarian thing to say, humans will always still fit in the mix, and I think what we're doing is we're just going up a level each step, and humans are gonna go up a higher and higher level of abstraction, right? So if you take the example of tickets, for example, it's gonna go from how many tickets did you handle today to did you, how many agents are you handling and how many tickets are they able to handle and then you're doing exception handling or you're pro. the agents to do something different or maybe now you're thinking about how you will avoid tickets entirely and so I think you're just gonna see folks kind of continue to climb up the curve and maybe start to do more of the work that their managers did, for example, yeah, yeah, can I add to that. So, uh, speaking of like what will humans be doing in the future, I think there are 3 things. So, uh, first it's executive function. And then there's common sense, the smell test, and then finally it's long horizon projects. So in terms of the executive function, you can curate, let's say, you know, a robust prompt, a few 1000 words. You need to decide what goes into it, what are the relevant contexts that an AI, a large language model needs to know to execute this job competently. It actually takes someone with a reasonable amount of seniority experience to know what's relevan. And then what's not relevant, right? And then at the same time, uh, no matter how beautifully you write your prom, or however advanced the models will get, like there is a bit of common sense check at the end of the generation. Someone needs to look at it and just say, hmm, it feels a little bit weird, right? And then you tell the AI to give you 10 more options. And then, so, and the final thing that models cannot do is long horizon planning. So right now, the cutting edge. Models can reason, can work effectively for about 20 minutes, right? So for any task that is beyond that duration, you still need humans who can think in terms of quarters and months and years in order to make those decisions. So to, to wrap up everything, I would say high impact, high consequence tasks will be within human's purview, whereas everything else, let's, you know, let an AI take care of it. Now both of your companies have been really successful in uncovering these hidden bottlenecks, time wasted, but you're you're solving for that. Where is the next bottleneck that you're going to see? What is the next problem that both of you want to solve? And Joseph, let's start with you, OK. Actually, there, there are lots of bottlenecks that will never go away, right? So AI is going to remove digital bottlenecks, information processing, uh, just text transformation related bottlenecks, but anything physical, AI can't do that, um, knowledge diffusion, approval chains, uh, resources. Allocation, your teams are too busy. There's a skills gap, just general knowledge management within the company. All of those will remain bottlenecks in the foreseeable future unless you know something very exciting happens. And then we would need to reassess everything. Yeah, so you don't see those being solved by AI right now. Would they be in the future, do you think? We will require several profound AI breakthroughs in order to solve for those. So, uh, physicality, shipping, I mean, uh, yes, they are robots, yes, they are self-driving cars, but at the same at the end of the day, it takes time to move things from A to B, right? And then people they only. have so much time in a day. If you want to communicate a message across your company, right, you need to think of really useful, really good tricks to get everybody to pay attention. And those are more human and physical real world problems that AI can help, but it's not going to solve. Yeah, Jennifer, what about you? Um, I, I think that on the knowledge diffusion piece, like one of the one of the biggest challenges with AI is that it can't improve or act on what it doesn't know or can't see. So if you think about a lot of work, talking about knowledge work in a company, a lot of that's actually invisible. And what I mean by that is it's not documented or written anywhere in a way that an LLM can search through it and synthesize and apply, right? It's knowledge that lives in people's heads as institutional know-how and so this is the problem that we're really focused on, which is how do you take that knowledge out and then put it in a format that is readable by both. Human and LLM because now once LLMs actually understand the context of how work is done at this particular team in this particular company, what are the real work flows like what are people doing? What are the lifeblood of this it can then help those people be better at how they work and in the absence of having that data and that understanding. Yeah, it's kind of like shooting blind, you know, it's almost like having a reference librarian who can go get you anything, but the bookshelves are empty. There's nothing to go get and so we're trying to fill all of those bookshelves with all of the relevant knowledge from the company and then make it so that you have that librarian who not only will get the book but then will come over to you and say, I actually don't think this was the right book like you should. Reading this other book instead or or the way that you were working right now actually you could be automating some portion of that and you should be doing this instead and so I think one of the things that'll be really interesting to see AI start to do is a little meta help people use AI um because the pace of change, uh, within AI I thinks faster than anything we've ever seen before. And I think it's gonna outpace humans and particularly organizations' ability to rock change and so we think a lot about how do we actually use AI to prompt people as they're working for ways that they could be better in using the tools that they have AI and non-AI based tools and so how do we use it to understand the context of what you're doing. Take the best of what you know how to do and then help you actually improve upon that and be better than you could do that before and then kind of guide you through as you're working what that means for you and how you should change your work I think that's where you unlock kind of the next big step change and that and that's the problem that really excites us and that we focused on my quick comment is. There's so much truth in what Jennifer has said. In fact, whenever we try to automate a new workflow, the first step is always to get the whole team sit together, and then we have like 1 hour, 2 hours where we just brain dump everything that everybody knows about that process and then we transcribe that and then we, that is the source. With which it's necessary for us to turn that into workflows into diagrams, into due diligence, into everything else. So just getting people in a room, force them to speak their part is so essential. Yeah. Oh, I'm sure that makes humans feel very much more essential. Joseph, thank you so much, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

Swire Hotels, one of Asia’s leading hospitality groups, believes that the future of hospitality lies in creating “houses not hotels”—spaces defined by individuality, intimacy, and emotional resonance. That philosophy has shaped the company’s most admired properties for more than a decade. Now, as Swire Hotels unifies The House Collective properties under a single global Upper House brand, the company is doubling down on the idea that a great stay should feel personal, distinctive, and rooted in place.

Houses Not Hotels

Companies everywhere are racing to turbocharge their products and services with AI. How can we harness the power of this new technology in a way that enhances our humanity rather than eclipses it?  Mauro Porcini argues that the next era of brand leadership depends on a straightforward equation: AI multiplied by emotional intelligence and human warmth. AI × (EI + HI). He explains how design can be used to restore narrative and meaning to products built on advanced computation, how leaders can craft a voice that stands out in an age of automated sameness, and why even the most technologically driven companies must double down on humanity.

Brainstorm Design 2025

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