Tim Brown

I'm hoping as we start to dig around in. In the sort of implications of AI and design, we'll actually come up with some new thoughts. And I'm hoping that we can get a little deep on the nature of design and its tools. Right? That or the nature of creativity in its tools, if you want to broaden out from design. But there's a relationship between them and it's. And people don't always think enough about that. I've got a particular hypothesis which I've had for a very long time about the relationship between ideas and then the tools we use to express those ideas. And I don't think it's a particularly novel idea. I think plenty of other people have spoken about it in the past.

What is that hypothesis?

Great creativity is always a blend or balance of the idea, the concept and the expression of the concept, right? The realization of the concept and that. And that there's lots of mediocre creativity where there's not a very interesting idea. And it's all about. It's all about realization. And you can call that craft if you want, but it doesn't necessarily move anything very far forward. And then there are ideas for which there is a poor execution, and therefore those ideas don't really have an impact or don't come to life. And tools, you know, whether you think about the great painters like, or Vermeer, or the ones who, like, just had an amazing control of the tools they were using, as well as wonderfully beautiful ideas, right? And the same is true for design. But when the tools get in the way, when the tools become. When there's too much of a burden, then it becomes too much about the realization and the execution, not enough of the flight. The creative bandwidth is applied to the idea itself. But if you don't have the tools, you can't express your ideas in the first place. It's that relationship between the concept and the realization of the concept which is so important in creativity. And the tools go a long way to determining that.

I'm curious, when you think about what's next for design, what does that feel like to you right now? And how does that relate to your journey in the world of design?

This has been my constant kind of interest throughout my career in design, is always wondering where design's going and what it's doing next. And there are obviously different forces that affect that. Sometimes it's. The force is to do with what we are designing. So in recent years, for instance, a lot of what has happened to design is that it's attempted to expand itself and its definition in order to encompass some of the more complex problems that face the world. Because, you know, design is all about trying to improve the state of the human experience of the world, in my opinion. And then there are other moments when there's some sort of disruption, just some technological disruption perhaps, or maybe even a societal disruption. For instance, like the, you know, when the Industrial Revolution happened, that was really the invention of professional design. That was a kind of an economic and societal disruption. But sometimes it's a technological one. And what we have going on right now is this enormous technological disruption to design that's coming about of generative AI. And it's probably, arguably maybe the greatest we've ever seen since, you know, maybe the invention of the pencil, which is a long, a long time ago. We've had recent ones like the invention of desktop publishing and kind of computer graphics and computer design tools. And it's not that they weren't, they weren't unimportant. They were important changes, but I think for me, this one feels extremely important. So I'm excited to talk about that with you because it's something that you deeply understand and it's obviously what you're working on.

Thank you. Yeah, I definitely think the Industrial Revolution is an interesting parallel. When you got started in your journey as a designer, if we go all the way back to your foundations, what did you want to be as a kid and how did you get to design?

Yeah, I mean, it's actually funny because I didn't actually grow up wanting to be a designer as such, partly because I didn't understood. Understand that design existed in the sense that we understand it today. You know, I grew up in a fairly sort of rural part of. Of England, which had very traditional view of education and, and what you. What, what you should be doing. But, but I, I mean, I knew, you know, some form of creativity existed. My father was a photographer. That certainly helped me understand that there were forms of work, if you like, that were not sitting in offices or being an engineer, which is what most of my friends dad seemed. Seemed to be. And I loved as a kid, I loved making things, drawing things. I was sort of a bit of a loner and I would hide up in the top floor of our house and I would build, build things. When I was younger, it was building things out of Lego and later it was building things from scratch and drawing things and kind of trying to use my imagination. But it wasn't until much later when I found, when I got to art school Actually that I realized that design as a profession was out there and that it was probably a pretty good, pretty good fit for me. I didn't have a particular kind of like, oh, I know I want to be this. But I was interested in the intersection of things. I was sort of an average kind of a kid when it came academically. I was not, you know, brilliant at anything, but I was really interested in both the arts and the science. You know, history and engineering and physics and, and, and art and, and that was unusual, at least in the, in the English context. It's unusual to be interested in those intersections. Most people went down one track or the other and, and design seemed to offer that. Right, because design offered to, it was an opportunity to think about how technology and science affects people and their experience. So it just, yeah, I, I fel. Lucky. It was a lucky accident that that design was what I fell into.

I'm curious, as you were making things at the top floor of your parents place, what were some of the things that you remember making and what was the thing that you felt most proud of creating early on?

Well, my first product or what I think of it as my first product, it was a one off, it was a prototype, but it was made out of lego. When I was a kid, England was, was at the depths of its sort of economic kind of downturn in the, in the early 70s and late 60s, early 70s. And we used to have these rolling power cuts. They seem to go on for years. And I remember taking all, I had a lot of Lego and I remember taking all my LEGO one time and building this huge flashlight for my mother so that she could, so that she basically she could use the kitchen. I built this light and it worked. And I remember being kind of excited that I could go construct something that was you, you know, had utility for somebody else. That was the first thing I remember anyway. It wasn't like I then started tinkering and making all kinds of useful products after that. In fact, I got into model making for a while. I enjoyed just making any kind of form and out of anything and some of them imaginary and some of them not. But yeah, that was my lego. LEGO was the, was the medium for my first product and it's been the medium for many other prototypes since. It's extremely rewarding to create something that others get benefit from. Whether it's a kind of a functional benefit, in this case of flashlight or some sort of emotional benefit is still extremely pleasurable. At least I find it so. And I think that's probably what pushed me towards design rather than art? Partly it's because I just don't think I was kind of creative enough in a raw sense to be. To have been a particularly successful artist. But also, you know, I think great art doesn't necessarily set out to please other people, but I find I enjoy the process of creating ideas that please other people or creating things that please other people.

What about it feels different than creating art?

Well, I mean, you have to understand something about them, right? I mean, you have to understand something about their situation and their need. You have to interpret that. You're not just expressing something that's purely from inside of you. You're somehow connecting something that belongs to somebody else, their need, their situation, with your own creativity in terms of how. What that might imply, what that might mean from what you might do to, if you, like, solve the challenge or problem that they have. You say combining those two things and then you're getting to some kind of result. And it's that sequence, for me, that's really interesting, that sort of understanding of people, a person, the world or whatever, combining that with things that I'm thinking about or that I might conceive of, and then that resulting in something new. I find that a very stimulating process. It connects you to the world. It requires you to be kind of curious. It means that to start that process, all you've got to do is get out and get curious about the world. You don't have to have brilliant ideas kind of bubbling away inside your head. And I think this is often where what kind of gets in the way of people's creative confidence is think to be creative, I've got to have ideas. They've got to be already there. I've got to just be able to get them out. Well, most, I mean, you know, we've all heard this. Most, if not all great designers and even many great artists do not rely on their own kind of, well, of ideas. They go out into the world. We go out into the world in order to be inspired, in order to gain input and then connect it to our ideas in order to create something. I think, you know, a lot of people who don't spend any time trying to be creative don't understand that, don't get that, don't realize that. Actually, all they need to do is kind of open themselves out to the world a little bit, and then that's the beginning of the creative process.

Yeah, you absorb many interesting ideas and then you channel them through tools and through things that you might have access to that Other people don't. As you went through design school and then early on in your career, how did your tooling evolve from pencil and LEGO sets? And what ideas inspired your early understanding of design? Were there people who were influential? Were there standout experiences that really shaped your path in those early days?

Yes, there were a number of. There were a number of things. I went off to design school to study industrial design and, you know, like at. In any educational establishment, particularly, you know, in the uk, which, where there wasn't a lot of the idea of liberal arts didn't. Doesn't really exist, at least not in most. You went through the part of the same system, you know it, you tend to stick to whatever field it is that you've chosen. So of course that meant that everybody else I was studying with was also an industrial designer, had come from very similar backgrounds. I mean, not necessarily kind of societally, but from a. This is what they wanted to do. And they had similar sorts of qualifications to me. And so we were all working on the same problems, the same projects, coming from the sort of, same sort of direction, really. And we still learn a lot from each other, learn a huge amount from each other. But that was true for me all the way. I did undergrad and then, and then graduate school at the Royal College of Art, where you and I both went. And that was all wonderful, but it led to a narrow, maybe quite deep, but narrow view of what design was and who designers were. And then I left the RCA and got hired by Bill Moggridge, who is one of the founders of IDEO and the founder of his own firm, Moggridge Associates, as it was back in the UK then. And he had a very different view of design. Right. Although he trained also as an industrial designer, he believed that design was a multidisciplinary activity. And so by then he had started to bring other kinds of people into the studio. And so somebody else I met right at the bfh, she was hired the same month as me, I think was Jane Fulton Suri, who's a psychologist and the profession of design research and human, what she called human factors back then into the company. And I started working with her straight away. Bill had also just coined the term interaction design and realized that design could be applied to software and software experiences, not just hardware experiences. So he brought some computer scientists and some graphic designers into. Into the firm. These were mostly in San Francisco, where I moved after about a year. So I suddenly found myself working with designers on design projects, but who came from a totally different view and Totally different set of experiences. They were expert researchers, or they were computer scientists, or they were interaction designers. And I was thrown into the middle of that, doing all of those things, as well as the thing I knew how to do, which dust design. So that turned me totally inside out. Right. I went from seeing design as this kind of narrow, kind of rather sort of. I don't what the right would come. It almost felt like it was elite elitist, for sure. But it was also. Was almost like almost monastic in a way. It was so narrow, this much more kind of vibrant, kind of inquisitive, kind of connected to the world in all of these different kinds of ways. And I found that incredibly exciting. I mean, it was a revelation to go to design school, and I love the experience of being design school. It was an even bigger revelation to work with this kind of group of incredibly talented people who came at design from different directions. And so Bill and Jane and others were just hugely influential in my development as a designer and my understanding of what design even was.

Mm. I'm curious, as you worked on projects at IDEO early on in your career, what did you learn from working with this multidisciplinary team? Obviously, IDEO is credited with popularizing design thinking and the multidisciplinary design approach. You in particular are known for championing both design thinking and design doing. How did that perspective get formed over the years and how has it evolved to what you think today?

Yeah, I mean, I think like so many of these things in the world, it was. Some of it was opportunistic or accidental. Right. It was to do with the people that came together. So, you know, ideo, when IDEO was formed, it was Bill's company, which was already interdisciplinary. It was already beginning to describe what became later termed as human centered design and design thinking. We'd been struggling because actually, interestingly enough, we were trying to apply design in a more strategic way with clients. And Bill had been interested in this, and he'd actually learned some of that from some other designers, John Reinfrank, who was a designer working out of the Midwest, out of iit and others who'd been trying to figure out how can design help direct companies, not just simply design their products. And there were others important people who'd been thinking about that in the sort of 60s, 70s, 70s and 80s. Anyhow, because we were trying to apply design in a field that, to be honest with you, clients were not asking for it. Right. I mean, you know, business people did not ask us to be. Help them be strategic. We had to actually find ways to describe what design even was right. How did design work? What were the steps which designers took in order to get to the end result? So we were already doing that in the context of Bill's firm. And we developed this kind of five or, I can't remember, five or six phases or steps that we used to think about design, starting with understanding users and ending all the way up and ending up with the realization of new products, which really was the fundamental kind of steps behind design thinking also, obviously. But then IDO was formed and that brought David Kelly into the picture. And David had built this interdisciplinary kind of engineering firm that worked with other designers, including bill, over a 10 year period before IDEO was formed. So suddenly there was this whole other side of interdiscipliness that came from inventive, innovative, creative engineering, largely hardware engineering, obviously. And you know, they had an incredible reputation for solving kind of product problems. Like, you know, how to go from a prototype mouse which nobody could make, to a really clever, cheap, easy to make mouse that was, you know, proliferated through the Macintosh and then many other platforms after that. So solving problems like that. So suddenly we had this even richer mix. And again we were having to try to describe to clients because we were consultants, we were getting hired by startups and growing businesses in Silicon Valley and Japan and other parts of the world to help solve their problems. We had to find a way of describing what it was we did. Why was this creative engineering stuff important? Why was taking a human centered view important? Why was it necessary to think about abstract strategic ideas that might come out of your design research before you decide what product or service you want to design? All of this stuff, we had to talk about it, we had to describe it. We were also teaching it, by the way, because all of us were teaching at Stanford and the RCA other places. And so the combination of trying to describe it for clients and teach it to students got us into this mode of trying to describe what design was. And I think it was from that that a lot of the terminology of design thinking, at least our version of it, and of course there were others doing the same thing, but our version of it came about and for me it became how can we really do two things. Firstly, you know, back to the what's next for design? I mean, I believe that design deserved to be further upstream, to be more influential with organizations, with companies, whoever we, we were working for, that it was a really important process that should be better understood by business. And so design thinking, it was a way of doing that, and I think we were surprisingly successful at that. The other half of it was, I also believed, because of my experience of bringing engineers and design researchers and psychologists and computer scientists into ideo, that many, many people were capable of being designers, but they needed to understand a little bit about what design was, because they weren't. They were trained to be scientists or they were trained to be engineers. They didn't have the mindsets and readily available to them. They didn't have the tools readily available. So they needed to understand how design happened. Right. And what it was they were being asked to do. So that was another role that describing design thinking played. Right. So those two things, like opening it up, increasing the influence of design, and at the same time, if you like, democratizing it, making it available for people who wouldn't necessarily hadn't spent all their education in design school like you and me, were the two driving main reasons why I was interested in kind of promoting this notion of design thinking. Interesting.

And then how did that evolve into thinking about design doing as well?

Yeah, I mean, it's been tricky one, to be honest with you. I mean, as soon as we started using the term design thinking, which we didn't invent, which had been around before, but hadn't been quite used in that same context, it implied, because we think of thinking as being of the mind, that it was all about what was going on in people's heads and not about the making part of design. And yet, obviously, the making, in whichever form the making happens, is an integral part of design. And, you know, you can have all kinds of semantic arguments about that. I actually believe that designers don't just think with their minds. I believe designers think with their hands. And humans do that in a lot of practices. Musicians think with their hands and think with their minds. And we should come back to that when we start talking about these AI tools, because I think that's what's exciting. I think the best tools allow you to think with your hands as well as think with your mind. And so for me, design doing and design thinking just the same, they're really largely the same thing. You simply cannot design unless you make. Any designing that does not include making is more like philosophy. And that's nothing wrong with that, but it's not generally awfully useful to people other than as an interesting intellectual exercise. And so I've always thought of them being one and the same thing. But unfortunately, the way we use the term thinking in modern parlance, we assume it to be an abstract thing that only happens in the brain. Interesting enough, the more we understand about the brain, the more we realize that anything but that happens, right? The brain is not capable of operating if it's isolated from our senses. The brain only works because our hands and our bodies are part of the process. So I think we've always been interested in doing. What is interesting, I guess today about design is that there are so many more ways of doing than there once were. There are so many ways of expressing our ideas, particularly largely driven by the revolution of the computer, right? The ability that gives us to express ideas and make ideas in new ways is phenomenal really.

How has computation shifted the landscape of what it means to make as a designer and to think through making?

I mean, it shifted it in, in almost every, every way, right? I mean, it's obviously shifted what we design. I was a design student just as computers were getting stuffed inside products, right? I mean, one of my undergrad projects was an ebook, right? We kind of outrageous idea back in the early 1980s. Nobody'd actually built one yet, but it was obvious it was coming, right? And so that was one of my first projects. And an awful lot actually of my kind of early career was working for companies trying to figure out what it meant to stuff intelligence inside products and what are the kinds of experiences and services that then result from that. So what we design has changed, but arguably just as much, if not more, how we design has changed. Computation affects what we can learn about people. Obviously it affects what they do, has a huge impact on their life, on everybody's life. But the way we capture our understanding of people has been massively expanded because of digital tools. How we express and think about our ideas, whether our ability to think in teams and use some of these collaborative tools, our ability to tell stories, our ability to prototype ideas either in the physical world or in the digital world, all so different from how it was 30, 40 years ago. I remember the first time we got our hands on the first computer, PC or Mac based prototyping, digital prototyping tool that allowed us to prototype user experiences or user interfaces, but it allowed you to write a script visually, an object oriented script, and simulate how a screen would work and make the animations and make them interactive and all that kind of stuff seems so simple today. But previous to that tool coming out for the Mac, we had to go and rent a TV graphics studio where they had these massive great computers that are used for making on screen graphics for television. They were called Quantel paint boxes. They cost $10,000 a day to use. You could only use it right at the very end of the process to make a beautiful demo of your idea for a client. And then suddenly we had this tool available that we could use every day, all the time, and we could prototype things really roughly and really early. And that is one of the fundamental qualities of a great tool, I think, is you can use it anywhere in the process. I think the tools you can only use at the end because they're very expensive, they're useful, but they're of limited use. They don't really help with the design. They're really helping with the storytelling about the design, to be honest with you. And great tools are ones that can be used at any time in the process. I mean, you think about pencil, right? You know, you could use a pencil for the earliest, briefest sketch or to write a note, or for a really detailed illustration of an idea, or for a detailed plan that describes every last detail of the design. And by the way, that is how we designed back at the beginning of my career, we literally did a pencil, you know, a pencil and ink drawing of the plan, of the product. But you could use it anywhere in the process, right? You can use it in a very considered way. You could use it in a very unconsidered or intuitive way. I think a little bit what happened in the beginning of Computer Aided Design Tools, for instance, was that, and still to some degree is true today, that the interface is complex enough that it's quite difficult to use them in every moment of the process. Now, that certainly does happen, and really skillful users of these tools do use them at every moment in the process. But I think the penalty that gets paid for that is that the sort of intellectual overhead in using the tools crowds out your. The. The bandwidth that you have for thinking about the idea itself certainly slow things down, right? And so I remember, you know, certainly in the early days of 3D CAD, it would take so long to build the model that you did not want to change it, and they were relatively limited in how much you could change. So you made your decision about the idea really early on, and then you kind of were stuck with it. You could make a beautiful rendition of that idea, but you were kind of stuck with the idea because you had to. Maybe you could tweak the kind of surface qualities of the idea at the end, like the color and material, but you couldn't really do much about the thing itself, the idea itself. And I think that's a real problem, because the best design is always a very happy balance between the idea and the expression or realization of the idea. And if the tool kind of crowds out your ability to think enough about the idea, then you end up with an end result, which is mostly about realization and not enough about the idea itself.

And there's a beautiful back and forth between the execution of the idea and the forming of the idea itself, which I think you alluded to earlier. Would you were talking about musicians. They discover the music as they make it.

Yeah.

And that's because the iteration cycle feels quick enough where you can learn as you're effectively prototyping.

I think for. For the vast majority of us, for the vast majority of designers, we learn as we express our idea. Right. We learn about our idea and then we want to change it.

Right.

I mean, you know, I sketch something and as I'm sketching, I'm thinking, oh, that's not really quite right. Or I didn't realize that. And now I have to think about this other thing that I hadn't thought about before, and I go and make another drawing or another sketch or another expression of the idea. There are some designers, and I've met some who have got such strong visual brains that they can actually figure it all out in their brain. And so when they express their idea, it's pretty much a kind of a carbon copy of what's going on in their head. A good friend of mine, now Tofukusawa, one of the great product designers of the last 30 years, is like that. He has such a clear idea in his head. When he draws, he draws like a pen plotter. You know, like the marks go down on the paper with no obvious order. But he's just like recording what's in his head. Even he learns to iteration, but he learned by building the thing right. Rather, he'll make the physical thing and then work on it. But when it comes to an image in his head, he can just express it on the paper just because he's so clear about it. My brain's not that good, so I have to work it out as I'm drawing it. And I think, to be honest, I think most designers work that way.

Yeah. Yeah, me too. Why do you think that is still the way that most designers explore ideas rather than going into piece of software or going into all of the tools that are available to us today?

I think there's a fuzziness about sketching, which is important in the early phases of the design process, where you can sketch without having had to make too many decisions. And design ultimately is just a whole series of decisions. And by the time you get to the final expression of a product or a piece of software, you've made a lot of decisions, or somebody's made a lot of decisions, you have to make too many of those up front. Again, it crowds out the ability to think about the core idea itself. The fuzziness, or the intuitiveness, if you like, of a sketch allows you to begin to think about the idea and learn about the idea without having to make an awful lot of decisions about it. Many digital tools can't handle that. Right. They require you to make a lot of decisions up front. Even if you don't really care about those decisions, you still have to make them. You have to choose a whole bunch of different things because of the precision that's necessary for many of these tools. Now, you know, obviously there are sketching tools which work just like basically electronic paper, and they're no different, they're fine. But I think when it comes to even something which is in the halfway land between the two, something like Photoshop, but certainly when you get to something like a 3D CAD tool, you're just having to make a lot of. You have to be precise about the dimensions of everything and exactly what form it is. You have to build it all. And this is what's so exciting for me about AI is the potential for allowing you to operate in this fuzzy space, but then still get to that precision that you need in order to express the idea later.

As you think about AI, how do you see it playing out in the design craft?

Well, I've had a picture, a picture about what I think AI design might be. For a long time. I hadn't quite realized that that's what it was, but I realized recently. Another designer that I have a huge amount of respect for and had the privilege of watching work years ago was Etri Sosas, who was the great Italian designer, the creator of the Memphis movement, designer of many iconic Olivetti products from the 1960s and 70s, and a great architect. And I. I remember sitting in his studio, and his studio was a big studio, but he had his own room. And it was a quilted white space, which I think was just meant to be very quiet. And then this big white table on which he had this little pad and he would sketch. These sketches would be like no more than 2 or 3 inches square, whether it was a building or a piece of furniture. Do this little kind of scrolly kind of chicken scratch sketch with a bit of color and things on it, which would be his latest thing, you see, and then in would come an Intern or one of his associates, he would hand that sketch to the associate, and they would go and figure out how to turn that into whatever piece of furniture or whatever building he was working on. Right? They were his AI, Right. We were collaborating with him to take his idea and turn it into something. So that's been my, if you like, my dream. Every one of us could have that fleet of associates and intern to take our ideas, help us turn them into the thing that we really want. There are other views that you can have of AI, but that was just such a powerful idea to me because it meant he could spend almost all his time thinking about the idea. And of course, my guess is when he was younger, I mean, he was 80 years old by then. When he was younger, he probably spent more of his own time executing his own ideas, and I think that's important. But he got to that point in his career where he knew exactly what he was trying to do, and he needed help actually executing it. So I'd be excited about AI being something that doesn't automate what we do. I mean, his ideas were totally unique. And I think that's what we should be striving for as creative people, is to create valuable and unique ideas. And I don't think you can automate that. But for AI to be our collaborator, to be our helper, to be our. To extend the power of our hands and our brains, that's the image I have of AI when you saw him.

At work, what happened after he handed the sketch?

They would take the idea to the next step so that he could review it, basically, and decide whether it was going where he wanted it, where he wanted it to go. So it was. They were his tool that helped him iterate. And so to go back to what you'd mentioned before, which is his idea is, you know, what's the role of iteration and looking at and exploring options in design? And it's very important, right? I mean, it's. In some ways, it's a form of creativity itself, right? I mean, evolving from one thing to another thing through multiple iterations is actually a process of design. And so I imagine that AI can be extremely powerful when it comes to exploring and evolving from one thing to potentially many multiples of things. I think AI will be able to do that much better than humans can. So I can imagine that there's a version of an automated design process that takes something that already exists. So you take a. I don't know, you take this pair of glasses and you say, okay, capture that, and Then a piece of AI, I could imagine making many, many, many, many versions of these, of these glasses, and you could choose different variations. And that is a design process. Right. And today designers spend their time doing that, and maybe in the future that can be done by AI. So I think this kind of combination, this sort of, this combinatorial version of design is something that AI is going to be very powerful for. That's the question of what's the starting point? Is the starting point some radical new question or some radical new piece of thought which would be kind of where ETRI would be or an existing thing that you're just trying to make a better version of?

That's really interesting, especially when we think about democratization and what the implications of AI might be when we can imagine a lot more people designing.

Yeah. And fundamentally it will be no different the way that we've interacted with our tools in the past. It's just that the AI is able to do this so much more magic, if you like, then our tools may have been capable previously. Although I suspect that when many of those tools were first created, they seemed pretty magical at the time. You know, for instance, I imagine when in the Renaissance they first figured out how to translate 3D perspective into a 2D image and they used, you know, various tools to do that, mathematical tools. That must have felt like magic, right? That must have felt totally. How the heck do we get this completely realistic image on a canvas from the world? We didn't understand how to do that. For now we do. That was magic. Right. So, no, it's not the first time by a long way that our tools will have seemed magical. One thing that I do slightly worry about, at least the way that some of these tools seem to be working right now, is that magic happens kind of behind the scenes. And as a creator, you don't really understand what's going on. And it's therefore a little bit hard to kind of interfere with it. There's a difference between creators and their relationships with their tools is that the ones who deeply understand how the tool works can kind of interfere with the tool and, and act on it in a way that changes the outcome. That's true of a musician, but a musician who is, you know, kind of good enough to rotely play a piece of music, that's fine and it's impressive. But a musician who's. Who really understands the music and really understands the instrument, a great jazz musician, for instance, can take the music in directions that are completely unique at a kind of moment. And I Think that's true of design tools also, or should be true of design tools. And I think it's not. And I'm intrigued. I don't know you and I haven't talked about this at all, but I'm intrigued about how we don't just make the beginning of the process intuitive, like being able to do a sketch or maybe do something simple that starts the machine going, as it were, but also having ways of kind of interfering with it as it goes along so that we can change the outcome.

How do you see the role of what it means to be a designer changing in the next 10 years?

It will reduce the amount of, if you like, handcrafted human only creativity, but it will probably increase the value of it. There will be less of it that's needed in the world, but what is needed will probably be a lot more valuable. And we've seen that with other technologies in the past.

Yeah, that's what publishing comes to mind as we saw graphic design explode in numbers. But the art of hand making a poster became much more valuable as a skill set.

Exactly. Well, in fact, two things happened with desktop publishing. Both are interesting. On the one hand, yeah, we saw this renaissance of hand letterpress and you know, the, the really physical craft of graphic design come back, but only come back in a very. Whereas that used to be used for everything, now is this very specialized hypheny thing. But the other thing we saw is there was this explosion, this kind of democratization, as you say, of, of graphic design that came through desktop publishing and digital typography and things, most of which wasn't very good, but it was available to everybody. And then out of that came this renaissance in really high quality graphic design as people like, you know, Massimo Vignelli and Eric speaker and a whole host of others got hold of these tools and they were brilliant designers who managed to take them to a totally new place. So that happened, you know, desktop publishing essentially started in about 1984 with the release of the Mac. By the time we got to the late 80s and early 90s, we had this incredible renaissance going on of graphic design and a whole new generation of graphic designers, type and typographers emerged. So I think we can look forward to the same thing here that we will see. There'll probably be a period where everything, a lot of this stuff feels rather either generic or not particularly well thought through, just not that good. But there'll be a lot of it and it'll be very accessible to a lot of people. It was just like back in the 80s, when you had this sort of crummy graphic stuff that was pasted over, every document looked terrible. And eight different fonts between the top of the document and the bottom, also terrible. I mean, that eventually all went away. So at some point in the future, I don't know where it's going to be. We're going to start to see truly new work that's coming from this technology.

Speak to that a little more. What do you think the world looks like with more designers being more creative more of the time using this technology?

Well, you know, when I look at it at the really high level, and this is something that has been apparent for quite some time, which is the number of important problems or even unimportant problems that the world faces through which design and creativity can make a contribution is not going down rather dramatically. Where we take into account all of the challenges of things like climate and stuff, we're not actually creating that many new designers, certainly not enough. And so anything that allows more people to design or allows the designers that exist to work further and faster is a good thing. Right? There's no shortage of things for people to work on. It may seem in certain moments that suddenly we've massively increased the supply for certain kinds of design and that actually the demand has not gotten bigger or maybe it's even going down. But I think it will shift, right? The supply will shift to other places where there may be latent demand. So when I think at the high level, I think it's just good that we're creating more design capacity in the world. Another implication is that if the tools are genuinely more intuitive and much faster and easier to learn, then we will be able to educate designers differently. We will be able to bring people into design who wouldn't have been able to come into design before, who've got powerful ideas but didn't have the skills to express them. We will also as. And this is something that, you know, I'm sure you've noticed, I certainly have in my career leading a design company, is that, you know, as designers get more and more senior, they spend more and more their time looking over design, directing design, but they lose touch with the tools and they have less and less ability to express their own ideas. And they end up they, you know, having to do what Etri was doing, they have to express their ideas to others, but these tools seem to hold out the promise. That doesn't need to happen in quite the same way. Right. And that designers, as they get more experienced, can still have their Hands on the tools, because the tools will be more accommodating in that way. And that's quite interesting because I think that might mean that the quality of thinking, if you like, the useful creative contribution of aging designers goes on for longer, which feels good to me. But I think that's an interesting implication of this. And I'm sure there are many other implications that we haven't even begun to realize yet.

What do you hope some of those implications are? What do you hope the future of design feels and looks like in this new AI augmented era?

I mean, I've always felt it's good when designers are as close as possible to making. We can produce some sort of tangible output as fluently and as quickly as possible. I think everybody benefits from that. And so I am excited about the potential of this technology to really improve that. Right. To make the process faster and so that we can do more of it and that we can spend as much time going through these iterations of thinking and doing as we talked about earlier, as possible. So that is something that I think it's really important. And, you know, everybody's very enamored with tools like Midjourney and Dall E and things today. They produce interesting 2D images, but there are many other ways to express ideas. And I think it's important that we expand that. Right. Because there are many other forms of important forms of realization that come from design in 3D and in 2D. So that's something that I'm excited about. I am excited about the potential to redress the imbalance between where design is needed in the world and where designers are today. The vast majority of designers are educated in Europe and North America. Actually, no, Today, the vast majority of designers are educated in China. So Asia maybe has more designs anywhere else. But anyway, it's in the developed or rapidly developing nations. And yet we need design everywhere. And so these tools can potentially level the playing field for parts of the world and for people who have not had access to design in the past and people who have brilliant design cultures that go back tens of thousands of years, but have not necessarily been able to translate them into kind of the modern economy. So that's exciting, I think. And then another implication, you know, is we've been grappling with the challenge of designing against more complex problems and for more complex outcomes. And, you know, one of the things we're finding out with AI as we design AI itself is that our kind of relatively simple thought processes do not do a very good job of understanding the unintended consequences of a lot of our design decisions. And, you know, whether that's designing a very complex building or a city or designing a complex process like a piece of AI software. I am very hopeful that AI can help us with that. Right. That it can help us improve our brain's capacity or our collective brain's capacity to design in a complex world. For instance, being able to realize designs that show us the unintended consequences of them through simulations and models much faster and before we put them out into the real world. And I think that relates to another whole field of technology around data and sensing and simulations and models, digital twins, all of these kinds of things that I think AI is going to be a kind of, really important kind of platform, if you like, on which to make use of some of those technologies in design. Because, you know, today they tend to be the domains of engineers because they're so difficult and technologically complex to use. But with the help of AI, that may not be the case.

You could do a lot of speculative design work quickly and ask the questions of are these things that we want in the world?

Exactly, exactly. Particularly when we're trying to shift from a mindset of design, which is we just design what we can and what we want, to having to design what the world can support, what the planet can support, what society. You know, the. The sort of. The responsibility of design, the. The context for design is. Is going to a really fairly dramatic change at the moment. We absolutely need ways of imagining the future and then bringing the future to the light, to life before we get there, in order to decide whether that's a future that's viable or desirable. Mm.

I'm curious, as you think about explorations of design ideas through images, through tools like Dall E and Midjourney, what are the limitations there? What other mediums of expression are valuable from a design tool set? What do you wish existed?

Well, I mean, for the most part, I haven't seen very many people. At least I'm only just beginning to see people who are really designing with those tools. I mean, today they're being used as communication tools, right? Like we want to express an idea or illustrate a piece of text or whatever with an image. And there's a whole field of illustration and things like that that's been around for a long time, that's built from, and that's great. But that's not design. Right. Design is when you create some new experience, some new product. And I think those tools were only. They're only just beginning to be used, actually. By designers and they fall short a little bit. I think if we're really honest with ourselves, they're really no more than a sketch, actually. They're a kind of a gestural sketch of what that thing might be like in the future. Because one of the reasons is that prompts are very imprecise, right? And so that's fine when you want the tool to come back with, if you like, its own interpretation. This is actually what the opposite of the problem we were talking about before, which is our current tools are too precise, but the AI tools right now are a bit too imprecise, particularly as you develop an idea. And so if you take away all the digital tools, we're not designing using words, right? We didn't sit at our table with our pad and our pencil and write words when we were designing. The reason for that is it's impossible to describe something accurately enough with words for anybody else to actually really go and do anything with it. It'll create a picture in your head, although not a very precise one, but that's the best you can do with words. But with a drawing with marks on a paper that visually represent what it is. You mean you can be very precise with a very crude tool. In fact, if you think about a map, a map can be very few marks on a paper and describe the world accurately enough for you to navigate around it. That's an amazing thing. You need that level of specificity or accuracy which comes from a visual language, not from a verbal language. So I mean, that's something that I worry about with the current tools is like verbal language can never be precise, and yet very simple visual language can be incredibly precise. The problem is when that visual language has to be complex, that's problematic. And that's a problem with the old style digital tools is they force us to be quite complex with our visual instructions right at the beginning. So if we can be simple with our visual instructions, we can still be very precise. So anyhow, yeah, that's something I think is going to be necessary in order for these AI tools to really be super useful when it comes to designing.

I think it's still really interesting that when we've gone through the entire design process and we've used all of these very complex visualization tools and design software, then what we end up with is still very two dimensional. And based on that visual language of the pencil that we all started designing.

I mean, I mean, you're right, but you can be very precise with a simple visual mark in a way that's useful that you can't be precise with words. I mean, ultimately it'll be the combination of the two, right. You can imagine in the future with it, with AI, we'll be talking to the AI and we'll be drawing, which is just what I. I mean, let's go. I go back to the edge. Free example. That's what he would do, right? He would draw something and then describe it to the associate or the intern and they get a double. Understand. They'd see the image and they'd hear his words. Right. So I think we'll be doing the same thing. We'll be talking to or prompting the AI and we'll be making visual marks somehow, whether they're in 2D, 3D, whatever. And it'll be the combination of those two, which will be just enough precision to get us to the next step of the process.

So what does the designer of the future look like and what would your advice then be to someone who's just getting started in the field?

I think it's always been the same. I think that designers in the future will know how to balance the effort they put into the idea and the effort they put into the realizing the idea. It's always been the same, always been true, and I think and will be true in the future. And so I would encourage any, particularly any kind of young designer, any student, to think about that as they get excited about new tools, this generation of tools, or any other generation of tools. It can be all too easy to spend all your time getting truly skillful at using the tool and forget that that will have a limited shelf life and will probably limit what you can do as a designer, what you can do creatively if you haven't also invested as much effort into your ability to develop the idea. So I think designers of the future will be the same as designers in the past in that way. And there'll be some designers who focus on the tool and they will have a role. But often it turns out they're the ones that help other designers who are really strong with their ideas, create the ideas that they have. Right. And fortunately, well, fortunately, I'm sure we want to think about, tends to be the creative people with the ideas that are the ones that have the impact, at least the impact that gets recognized and rewarded. So that's, that's something to think about. I hope that design of the, of the future, because of the way that these tools develop, to be more in intuitive, allow us to think with our hands again in a way that we used to be able to with physical tools, and we have been less able to do recently with digital tools, that designers of the future will be able to bring not just their intellect to the design process, but more of their emotion to the design process. And I think that's relevant. I think design, the results of design are powerful because they connect to users or audiences emotionally as well as intellectually. I mean, when we walk into the nave of a great cathedral, it humbles us, right? It strikes as emotion, not just, oh, that's a really interesting column. And the way that arch works is beautiful. It's like, yes, that's there too. But we just get some sort of emotional feeling from great design. And I think that in order to get the emotion out, somehow, the emotion has to have been put in it in the first place. And I think that therefore, designers need to be able to have a way of designing to some extent with their emotions as well as with their intellects. And so I hope that after what has been a, you know, what, 30, 20, 30 year period where that's been relatively harder for designers to do because of the nature of tools, it might get just a little bit easier.

Again, speak a little more to the nature of the tools. When you think about designing emotionally, what did the previous set of tools allow you to do that the current tool set doesn't?

Well, I think it was a combination of the tools, but also perhaps the way designers were taught. There's a wonderful film, and I wish I could remember who the director of it was. Now, about the Bauhaus, and has a lot of footage from the time and shows these amazing theatrical experiences that the students used to create where they'd make all the objects and props and then perform these things and that, you know, these were people that became the great architects and the great furniture designers and the great industrial designers of the 20th century. Right? Or certainly the ones that came from Germany, of which there were quite a lot. They were all educated through the Bauhaus. And the Bauhaus ended up being the educational theory for almost all design schools. But these really kind of artistic experiences that the designers were having were all about how to translate emotions into something, right? I think a lot about that. So there was an educational experience that they had, but also, you know, cutting out card or, you know, casting something in plaster or carving a piece of wood or taking charcoal and making big marks. These are all things you can do with a feeling, right? They're things you can do. They're kind of physical. There's just something about them which allows your emotion. You can be really thoughtful and slow and precise. You can be really violent with things, you know, and that's been very hard to do with digital tools. And I'm not saying we want to go back to just recreate what we could do in the 1920s, because that never is how it works. But we do seem to have kind of detached the design process and the tools we use and maybe the way even describe the process, which has become rather intellectualized in a way, and we can maybe blame design thinking for some of that, has detached our emotions from design. And it's not like all design should be emotional. And it. And it certainly isn't about expressing your own emotions necessarily, but it is. It is about how do you get to that emotional connection that people have with the results of design and what is it that makes that happen? And I think there's something about the immediacy of the process helps with that. And so I'm hopeful that these tools will be more immediate, we'll be able to change direction faster, we'll be able to express ourselves across a wider bandwidth than we've been able to more recently. And that will be a good thing. And this might be one of those places where words is really useful. It might be, I'm designing a product and I can tell it, hey, hey, I want this product to be a bit more grumpy, or I want it to be happy. And maybe that will actually be a process and the AI will interpret that and what that means and what visual language and semantics, and it will bring that to the result in some interesting way that might be overly pastiche like to do that. I don't know. In a way that sometimes I feel that's true of kind of the modern movies. You know, the way music is like this, so formulaic, or a Disney animation is a bit formula. So it might then lead us down that path, which wouldn't be so great. But equally, it could be a way for designers to bring expression to things that isn't possible today. So that all remains to be seen.

Is there anything that we should be talking about that we haven't really covered yet?

I guess if I wanted to take anything away from this, it would probably be that as creators, we've always had a symbiotic relationship with our tools, right? That we make our tools and our tools make us. That's true in all of life, but it's certainly true in creativity. As tools change, so new things become possible. And that's always exciting. I think that we are as we talked about right at the beginning, we have had a stage that feels pretty fundamental and maybe about as fundamental as when somebody figured out how to make a pencil. And you think of everything that resulted from that, that's pretty wondrous. I imagine all kinds of novel and interesting ways in which results that are going to stem from some of the kind of fundamental qualities of AI as a tool. And of course, AI is going to apply to every artistic and creative medium, including music and visual arts and absolutely everything. So we will probably learn some strategies, some of which were highly specific to a certain medium, certain purpose, like design, and some which are generalizable across multiple purposes and multiple media. And it'll be interesting to see what emerges there. But yeah, I, I think, I think being a little bit reflective and thoughtful about how each of us relates to the tools we use and how tools help us reach the goals that we have creatively and that we have as, as designers is something that's worth doing. I'm sure we're going to be overwhelmed by different versions of these technologies in the coming years and it'll be very. Be very interesting to see what design schools start to do in terms of what they teach. What's the new curriculum for design going to be with this technology in the next few years? That's an interesting thing to think about.

I'm curious, what are some of your favorite tools?

I'm less of a designer as I'm more of a observer of design these days who happens to be trained as a designer and spent a lot of my career designing. But funnily enough, I spent a lot of my time writing. And so when I'm designing, I tend to resort to very simple tools. I tend to use ETRI's approach more than I use, you know, the kind of hands on. I know how to use the technology. And in fact, I am excited personally about the potential to get back to being able to manipulate tools and get to kind of end results. I've always been, I mean, and this is something that I actually developed when I was, I was at the RCA and in fact you and I were talking about the other day. But I've always used a lot of kind of montage and collage in my. I literally build ideas by bringing other ideas together. It's again, part of, you know, I've always seen design as being this kind of connective process. And so I would end up with these thick layers, layers of tracing paper with different photocopies and stuff all pulled together to try and make some kind of collage, kind of version of whatever idea I was trying to get to.

So.

And I still do that now. You know, I'll take my iPad and I'll take picture of something and then I'll sketch over the top of it, and that'll be kind of a collage of some form or another. I'm quite excited about being able to do that to a much more interesting degree.

One more question for you around creativity. Why do we create?

Oh, I. That's. I mean, it's a great question. Although I think it's an. The answer is, is that it's innately human.

Right.

Herbert Simon, who was actually one of the fathers or grandfathers of AI Nobel Laureate, when he defined design, he defined it as whenever we seek to turn existing situations into better ones. So we are designing, I think that's in an innate human process. Right. We are always seeking to turn existing situations into better ones. We're always trying to shape the world somehow to better suit our purposes or to suit our desires. Whether those needs are collective needs. In other words, we're trying to design the world to be better for all of us, or whether they're individual needs in the sense we're trying to express ourselves in some way to make a point or to influence others. It doesn't matter. It's all of those things. But it's innately human. It's partly to do with the fact that we're a social species. Influencing others is literally wired into us. And it's partly the fact that we are thinking machines. Right. We think about our world and the context in which we're in, and we are driven to make it better, genetically driven to make it better for our future generations. We couldn't not design, even if we may not have always called it design or we may not have always called it creativity, but we couldn't not do it. We wouldn't be human if we didn't do it.

Yeah. There's something intrinsically rewarding about it.

Yeah.

As well. Not just extrinsically rewarding.

Right.

It's not just about making the world better for us. It's also the emotional feeling of creation.

You literally get a buzz from it. Right. I mean, you know, fire something off in your brain that you literally get a chemical reward for, for being creative. Whether that's in the joy of completing something, whether it's in the joy of the process itself, whether it's in the joy of seeing a reaction that others have of what. Whatever it is. I mean, there are multiple inputs as it were to that, that create that chemical reaction, but it's there for sure.

Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Gord. It's a great conversation, and I love thinking about these things and, and, but we don't think about these things enough. Right. And particularly in these moments where when we're going through such a kind of massive change as this sort of.