Apple’s former design executive on tools, purpose of design and creativity in the age of AI | Charles Migos, intangible.ai

25:41Charles Migos:Totally makes sense. And it just made me think of so many different areas of, I suppose, where design has the superpower and how can designers start shifting that. I suppose from you being in organizations that are very design-driven like Apple and maybe they are more technology-driven like Microsoft, how would that change in terms of how you would go around showing this value of design again speaking of research apple again i'm not sure if you can comment on it but was very famously never doing the research it was all about the vision and what i suppose we decided in the room and it was less about user research and testing and a b testing and kind of figuring out the truth but more about kind of what steve jobs and johnny live decides to do or maybe i'm wrong i don't know So how would you, I suppose, balance what you've said depending on the culture of organization?

26:34Well, interestingly, a real truth about Apple that not many people, that's counterintuitive, is it is very much an engineering-led company. And when you think about who gets up on stage and speaks to the things that Apple has done, until very recently, those were all people of engineering backgrounds, the exception being Johnny, who would appear and spoke very, I think, esoterically about industrial design more than anything else. But everyone else is from an engineering background. And when you're in that company, you observe the tastefulness that exists within engineering. Like they understand the gestalt of Apple as good as anybody that works at that company.

27:12And Apple's very careful about the people that it hires into. And that's how it preserves its integrity around design. But so much of that integrity actually comes from the engineering organization. And the trifecta of decision making that happened, at least in my era, was the senior executive leader of that division, coupled with the senior engineering leader of that division, coupled with design, were how decisions were actually made. You contrast that with Microsoft where it is, again, a very engineering centric organization, but the central role in Microsoft is that of a program manager or a PM.

27:50And those PMs typically have engineering backgrounds and they're taught to pre-specify everything before it gets built. So design, the appreciation for design is very different, but the truth of them being very engineering and technology centric companies is just that. It's actually true. Katarina, I'm drifting a little bit. Can you bring me back to point?

28:11Charles Migos:Sure. We're discussing what's, I suppose, the difference, how to show the value of design and especially design, this new type of design that we're discussing and the role of a design leadership within different cultures, whether it is within Apple, where maybe you need to prove less. Everyone, as you said, even engineers know the value of design. And I suppose, and by the way, when I say Microsoft is engineer driven, I love Microsoft products. And I feel like there are incredible designers who work there that actually drive incredible innovation within design. But from the outside, I feel like two organizations feel like they have contrasting culture, but maybe I'm wrong.

28:49No, no, no. I think you're quite right about it. And again, you know, one human's experience in a particular era does not the truth of today make, right? So I will say that the thing that was true at Apple is they didn't conduct external research, but they did a lot of internally facing research. And we did a lot of human factors study. We did a lot of end user study internally to Apple, which is using the corpus of Apple employees and never reaching out externally because Apple is very secretive. So and the thing that Apple really did focus on, which would behoove places like Microsoft, is human factors based research.

29:26There is a lot of it is at Microsoft, my experience was pretty qualitative, less empirical, much more context oriented, didn't really focus on actual human factors considerations, anthropometrics, cognitive psychology, ergonomic factors, environmental factors. And Apple does that very, very precisely and rigorously. But otherwise, they were hiring you as a designer for the knowledge that you already had or as an engineer for the knowledge that you already had. You weren't expected to go out and acquire new knowledge. You expected to be hired with all that knowledge on board and away you would go.

30:02The other thing that was true about Apple was you always designed in high fidelity because in order to execute at high fidelity, you had to have considered all of the details. We would do wireframes occasionally, but mostly you were looking at final screen or as near to it as you could approximate. So that there was always that understanding of what the end user experience is going to be. It wasn't abstracted away at any point during the process, which was not true at Microsoft and not true at other companies that I worked.

30:29Charles Migos:That's very interesting that you mentioned high fidelity. Do you think that this would potentially, I'm an optimist, will shift the more organizations will become design driven because we can produce high fidelity prototypes, high fidelity designs now much faster and much cheaper as designers, not necessarily, again, as design teams using the right tools, we can produce those high fidelity prototypes. Therefore, there is only even more reason for everyone to become like Apple where everything discussed in detail, everything is all about, I suppose, every single aspect that design brings rather than just the structure and the engineering.

31:05Yeah, well, look, the rules have changed, right? Like the level of sophistication around like micro pattern design in 2D screen space applications is, you know, way beyond what used to be true at Apple when I worked there 10 plus years ago. And what's brilliant about these tools is you can go there. You can go all the way there, right? And again, that statement of like, now every designer can be a creative technologist, can be a creative technologist, absolutely true. And you can bring just the normal amount of rigor that you would bring for any other part of your role as a designer and be able to test the theory yourself, create a thing that is testable by users, create a thing that demonstrates intent or potential to the team.

31:50in a way that simply wasn't possible before. So at Apple II, we did a tremendous amount of prototyping. The prototyping was really expensive. We had internally developed prototyping tools. Gaining mastery over them was really hard. Everything was abstracted. It was really hard to think in a natural design language kind of way about what you were doing. Everything had to be reduced to like math and some understanding of a tech principle. And that's changed. And that is a fantastic evolution for us.

32:20Charles Migos:Let's talk about intangible, because I feel like you are building something very interesting in the era that we live now, which is design process is changing. And there is so much focus on text to visual or text to something tools. And your tool basically goes the opposite way. And it is very much visual intuitive. and we had a conversation earlier about how there is this I suppose misconception about how we think and how we create that current tools are focusing on which is the interface of speech and text so how do you think about this problem within the intangible and how did you decide to create a tool what principles did you use when you thought about what designers and creatives need in this current stage?

33:08Yeah, so the first, it's very important for me that we are honest to the actual creative process and the creative mindset as it exists for the individuals, the teams that they work with, their interactions with their stakeholders for review and approval of design direction, their interactions with clients, if it goes to client-facing kind of design. My observations about what was true in the generative AI space was that none of these things seemed to take that into account. It felt like they were sort of imposing a new modality on the way in which we practice and work as creatives. And again, as designers, we're not artists, right?

33:45We're problem solvers. We were there to thoughtfully consider myriad factors and choose wisely among them to bring some solution forward that solves a real problem for some person other than ourselves. And it's not pure art in that regard. But even if it is pure art in that regard, there are things that you simply can't express in words there are things that can't be articulated before they are demonstrated let's say right you and that there is this need to have not just that modality of text to something but WYSIWYG and direct manipulation and tactility and that's the part that's missing today and that's the part that we're bringing into the process so we serve film industry we serve creative ad agency space we serve game development we serve events design and the way in which we serve it is we're putting generative ai tools into into the right framework and workflows that meet the the mindset and the mental models of the creatives in that process and so everything that we consider in our system honors that and takes that into into account so the way I describe it is like if any of you are familiar with 3D systems, then hopefully you'll recognize this truth about them.

35:03They're deterministic environments. They're not really great for what I would call sketching. You kind of have to know what you're going to create within them before you start creating within them because they're incredibly sophisticated and complex tools that require an enormous amount of investment just to learn. And then because they're so technical, that's where you sort of need to have a target in mind and then reverse engineer the steps that you need to work through in 3d to realize it and for 30 years i thought that was for lack of a better word bullshit and there was a better way to think about how technology could apply and how it could be humanized right and then when you fast forward to today when we have you know these things sitting around in our pockets and they're all like a hundred times more capable than the systems i used to design for you know 20 odd years ago there's no excuse for not doing better, right?

35:53And the way in which we do better is, again, to be very pure around what matters for the creative process. Now we're taking generative AI and we're making it easy for people to do things in 3D that were very hard, very time constraining, and required a lot of technical knowledge to do. And now people who have no 3D training can do them. And then they can use that 3D representation of a world to control generative AI output, which is a thing that they can't do anywhere else. So the reason that people like our tool and our, you know, Hollywood loves us right now is because you can place a camera exactly where you want it.

36:30You can animate that camera. You can animate the stuff that happens in front of that camera and you get an exact result on the opposite side. And it's not one that you had to in a deterministic way, sort of like, well, how do I reverse engineer a prompt to get me that result? It was this nice combination of I'm going to use words where it makes sense. I'm going to use direct manipulation where that makes sense. And I'm going to get to a point where, aha, I see it. And then I can drill in and provide additional detail around it where I want, when I want. So those other modalities don't do that very well.

37:02This set of combined modalities that we're building into our system allows people to work with generative AI in a way that makes sense for them and allows them to do things that they can't do kind of anywhere else. But it's all, again, about the essential truth of who that user is and what she cares about.

37:16Charles Migos:I'm so with you that, first of all, on the traditional problems of 3D, I was the early user of 3D Max and it felt like math and nothing else. It felt like incredibly difficult calculations and definitely not something where you can be playful and creative and just come up with ideas. And again, like we create in any other space, be more sketchy, be more free flowing. So I'm very happy to see that the industry shifted from that way. But also I agree with your point that speech to or text to visual is just one modality. And I'm definitely not the type of person who can describe in a very precise way what I want to see.

38:04Charles Migos:I'm much better sketching and drawing and putting things together. And I think that's quite normal for visual people who work in creative or design industry. So I'm glad to hear that there is a shift from just speech or text to something, tools into more collaborative and free-flowing and just easy tools that we can all use. Yeah, we're in our best mindsets when we're in a fluid creative state, right? And so we're trying to make sure that in our environment, you're in that fluid creative state for as long as possible, as long as possible. And then when you make that choice for, I see it now, and you want to drill in and focus on it, you can.

38:44True for you, True for Teams.

38:46Charles Migos:So we'd love to speak a little bit about the concerns about AI, because another big chunk of questions that we had before this podcast is about all sorts of IP, copyright issues that we all kind of facing, but also don't know what to do with. So what is your view overall on current state of the copyright and IP within the world of AI? What does it mean for creatives? How should we understand and adapt to it? Well, first of all, it's a real concern and it's an important one. I'm human. I come from creative industry. I have many friends that work in creative industry. I've seen the impact of generative AI.

39:31I have a personal point of view of whether or not it's acceptable for a model company to scrape the artistic efforts of a variety of designers and artists and directors of films and then encode them into a model that makes it possible for anybody to reproduce what was formerly their art as a purely a style exercise. I don't love that. I don't think that the incumbents thought hard enough or carefully enough or cared enough about those people whose work they've usurped. That's me. That's my position on it. And so a lot of people in our creative industry are coming from that point of view and they hate it.

40:09They hate what they're seeing. The challenge is that Genie is out of the bottle and it's never going back. And so the question is, what is the best thing that we can do all things being equal? Well, the fundamental choice that I've made, say, with respect to the tools that I'm providing is I've yet to meet a designer or a creative that is as vocally against the use of chat, GPT, or cloud as they might be for, say, mid-journey or runway or any of the diffusion model tools, right? They're happy to do that. So in our world, when you are realizing your own ideas, they were always your ideas. We're using large language models to execute against your creative intent, your creative vision, whatever that is.

40:47And there's never a possibility for intrusion from someone else into that sphere. That's on one side of the world where you're creating things in 3D. You're telling your story, you're animating cameras, you're animating characters, you're doing all that stuff. Now, on the other side, you do use diffusion models to render. And those models have been trained on other people's work. The best thing that you can do for people is give them choice. So some models are ethical, let's say. And so we're going to provide access to those ethical models and you could choose to use them. Other people will not have a problem with using MidJourney and so they shall be able to use MidJourney or Nano Banana Pro or whatever they want in context.

41:30Major houses like WPP or Sony Pictures, they're rolling their own models. And so we're going to to be, we're trying to be smart in the building of a platform that can plug into any model, including their own, so that they have creative choice. Now, if you were vehemently against it, you can still extract a tremendous amount of value of the system in areas which are, you know, for lack of a better way to say it, morally safe. But then if you choose to, you can go down these territories to use models that you approve of, or that the house approves of, or that the client approves of. The answer then is in effect choice, providing choice.

42:08Charles Migos:Ah, this is so good to hear that this was very much an integral part of how you thought of designing a tool, building an ethical consideration. So do you feel like in general, in the future, there will be more and more companies, like you said, WPPs and Sonys of the world already building their own models that are safe and built on their own IPs and therefore more ethical than, I suppose, open source models. Is that the way forward? So will we see some other shift which will help us create this, I suppose, better design? We're definitely going there, right? Like, I mean, it's almost commodity already, the ability to kind of like train or fine-tune a model using your own content.

42:53We talked about a variety of tools for designers. You'd asked at one point, you know, what industrial designers might use. Well, the preeminent tool for industrial designers right now is something called Viscom. And in Viscom, you know, apart from it being trained on like standard industrial designers, sort of stylized Kopec marker sort of illustration or rendering, you know, it's trained on that stuff already. you can actually train it with your own sketches, your own reference imagery, your own mood boards, and get something entirely new on the opposite side. So WPP has already built their own model.

43:29Sony Pictures already built their own model. And each of us gets to build our own models too. And that's definitely where the world's going.

43:37Charles Migos:So do you feel like it will be easier for individuals then to build their own models? Because right now it seems like a luxury for companies that are big and can afford training their models and all the servers that it requires versus someone like an individual creative who doesn't have the capacity to do that you know i do it i do it myself using uh figma make right and so it's like uh built my own we have our design system and i employ the design system as part of what i prototype in figma make and when i'm coloring out those side the lines because we have new component architectures or a stylized workflow that needs a custom approach i'm in effect training of Figma make based on, you know, the data of Figma files.

44:16So, um, that is, that is one example. And in Vizcom's case, you know, you're, you're simply saying like, here's a, here's a folder full of imagery. That's whatever the mood board, my style, whatever it is. And it will train a model on, uh, being able to reproduce it. It's a fine tuning model. It's some offshoot of some other preexisting open source model primarily, but it allows you to do exactly that.

44:38Charles Migos:And can we trust big companies that if we upload our own data, that's definitely only used for us and no one else? I can tell you, that's a tough question. Can we trust the big companies? I have many friends that work at big companies. I've worked at them myself. I'm not sure. It seems like we're unconstrained right now is the best way to put it. It seems like we don't care as a body of humans. We're just sort of putting it all out there and making use of these things and feeding them full of data through our use. our use. Can we trust the companies? We have to basically come to our own conclusions about what is acceptable to us, just the same way we choose what our privacy settings are in social media spheres.

45:21They're not providing a lot of choice on that front right now, but I expect they're going to have to. It'll be legislated.

45:26Charles Migos:I love this. Some refreshing perspective on where we are with the world of AI. But we'd love to kind of finish this part on the future. And where do you see, again, speculation, purely speculation, no one knows where the future goes, especially as we'll dive into all sorts of practical things about tools in a second. They will change in a month, in two months, all these conversations will get outdated. But I suppose what, by you being for 30 years in the industry, literally in the center of some of the most creative companies and most forward-thinking and innovative companies, and now being in the middle of AI revolution, building tools.

46:08Charles Migos:What do you see maybe that others don't see yet? Maybe it's not far-fetched, 100 years in the future, but maybe something that you see that maybe is not discussed on the LinkedIn of the world, on the internets of the world yet. Yeah, well, as I intimated before, what we're seeing in our LinkedIn feeds is pretty superficial, right? It's like eye candy. It's kind of like everyone is claiming an idea and they're not actually offering a solution around it. It's kind of like, look what I thought of. This is going to be possible. Put a stake in the ground. It's mine. Who gives a shit? I'm, you know, I, I don't believe in futurism and I hate it when we as designers are, you know, it's exciting sometimes to do like, to speculate about what things can be and to do futuristic concepts of scenarios, likely or unlikely.

46:56But, you know, what we do in our function is material and important, and it requires the rigor of thought and intentionality. And when we bring those things to bear, the future reveals itself to us. And I have been lucky enough in my career to have been a part of pretty transformative things. And I was not the smartest among the people that I got to work with, but you work with smart people and you maintain curiosity around what's possible, some of that smartness rubs off. And again, that first principles approach to what matters, it is what matters to that end result and that human around that end result is always my guide.

47:39So what do I see right now? I see the truth around what film creation is, what game creation is, what creative development is that isn't being honored. And I see a potential for us to embrace principles and approaches around collaboration and communication of ideas that start to stretch beyond the one-for-one interaction that we have with these systems and their modalities into group-based contexts where we can amplify our own thinking and enrich in what's possible because we are doing that. That's what I see. If I permit myself one bit of futuristic thought around, say, what I'm doing, is that the mediums are changing.

48:22There's not the same demand that people of my generation had for, say, feature films. You know, and it was every weekend you would go and see one or two movies, right? And that's not true for the younger generations today. They're consuming a lot more media in many more forms than was true of Gen X and even of millennials. and the kinds of content that they're looking for is very different in its feeling even though the ip is the same so you might like the marvel cinematic universe and you might enjoy their their their films but one of the most brilliant things that say epic did with fortnite was to tie in and a wonderful game with a social context and a timely one so the way that they would tie in like Marvel Cinematic Universe or they had the Travis Scott experience or that the DJ Marshmallow experience was a first glimpse into what that future space might be where the consumption of media is way more collaborative and way more interactive and different.

49:26And as a fan of these things myself, I'm looking for new ways to explore my fandom in them today. And generative AI is unlocking amazing new potentials in storytelling and form of story, in addition to helping us do our work in better ways than when we were able to before. So I don't know if that's a satisfying answer, but that's what I can see. But I'm just going to maintain, man, design is important. Do not forget how important design as a function is. Do not forget how important design first principles are. They can always be a beacon and a guide, even in the most transformative times of which we are all finding ourselves today, within which we are.

50:10Charles Migos:Yes to that and yes to more power to design in organizations and businesses in the world as well. So I suppose what are the new opportunities for designers now as I suppose there is this kind of shift for a lot of designers to figure out again, using trying different AI tools, how to do things faster, how to do things better. But I feel like it's almost like the wrong pathway. We will all figure out how to do things faster. We will all figure out how to do things better using AI tools. But as you said, we are not really utilizing the real opportunities of AI for creativity, like storytelling, like this narrative based things.

50:52Charles Migos:So what kind of problems I suppose designers should be solving right now instead of how can we do our work faster? Yeah, again, it's always around how do we bring more clarity to what we're trying to do, right? Like that is basically it. That's the one. If I have to pick a razor, that's the razor I'm going to pick, right? Like, how do we bring more clarity to what we're trying to do and why it matters to us, to someone that we're trying to serve? It's not a rush to efficiency. It's a rush to better outcomes. It's being able to be very outcome focused as you make these choices around your own process and the tools that you use within them and what you encourage your teams to be using and how they are using it together as a group.

51:38That will matter most. Again, the outcome is the only thing that matters. Make smart choices to enable that outcome and have better outcomes is the way I continue to think about things.

51:51Charles Migos:Should we have more fun in the process? I suppose the creativity was my concern with any efficiency is like creative process used to belong for a reason, because it actually brings you some pure joy of creation. and as soon as we start doing it faster, it almost takes away the joy that we actually had. So how can we enjoy the creative process more than now that we have more of these tools? Well, look, it's one designer's, one human's experience of there was the moment before I tried using these tools intentionally and the moment after. And when I realized the power of Figma Make, I had a holy shit moment, right?

52:33Where it's kind of like, wow, man, And there's so much I can do that we can do better because we have this integration with a standard designer toolkit and a standard for our whole design industry. So just try, right? Like get started. And I had that very visceral response to like, wow, I cannot believe it was that easy to do. I basically architected. So right now, if you go and use my tool, believe me, it's not a bastion of design right now because it's not intended to be. It's intended to prove theory around technology and workflows with people that know what they're doing. We had a lot to explore in a very deep proprietary tech stack with the community before we could go like, yeah, we've got it.

53:20We understand how this tech works and now we're going to package it in a different way. And now we're packaging it in a different way. I was able to model that whole experience in like a weekend with real richness and sophistication, the part that we call craft, which is another word that sets me off at times. And it was there. And my ability to just say like, okay, here's the light in the dark mode and here's the transition animations. It's all in this prototype. By the way, I had the prototype declare itself. I'm like, on this page, go and put all the components with all of their, all the associated data and markup there.

53:58And it did it, you know, like that stuff used to take weeks. I'm here for it. Yeah. I'm like, thank you, Figma. Thank you, Figma Make. Go, Dylan. I'm a fan.

54:08Charles Migos:Great. Well, yes, to Figma Make. We'll dive into actually the technicalities of how using Figma Make and everything in a second, because people have lots of questions. And I'm also conscious that these questions might become again, all those answers rather become outdated within a week, two weeks, month. And we always try to provide the most value in the moment, but also in the longer future. But would love to go to the practical level of everything that people are asking because there are many questions. So let's start with the first question from Shale. So Shail is asking, how would you set up a small creative team to use Figma Make efficiently?

54:45Charles Migos:And what is the ideal number of designers on a single project? Well, it's always relative to the project itself and the scope of the outcome at hand is the first thing. So, you know, you size accordingly. If you have, say, a team of three and you've got some specialization of roles where someone feels a little bit more UX-y and systems-oriented, another feels much more visually-oriented, and maybe you've got a generalist profile somewhere in the mix, well, you've already got the right mix of things to start experimenting with something like Figma Make against those three dimensions of design pretty easily, right?

55:27where the ability to kind of like think through system and architectural considerations, those that have bearing on what the end product experience is for that systems-oriented HCI-biased UXC person is astounding today. The visual designer no longer has to redline everything or create like an exhaustive list of variables handcrafted each way so you can have these style sheets. You still have to do that and you have to have rigor around those things, but you can use these automated systems to generate most of that stuff and to do derivations. So you got a great light mode? Cool. Can you do the dark mode derivations for me?

56:09And you'll get an amazing starting point for that stuff. And then that generalist, they are in possibly the best of all possible positions. The generalist designer profile, that classic agency profile, let's say, of people who are dangerous at product level thinking, business thinking, product experience thinking, and they're strong visually, man, their time has come. Their ability to do things and be very descriptive and complete and thorough and to be able to complete the thought is unprecedented. So that generalist profile of design, I think, yeah, is probably going to be the strongest profile of design that we see moving forward.

56:52But I would also encourage that we do more of the HCI side of house too, because I am not seeing enough human factors considerations. People, bring that into your thinking. It's very important. Perception, cognitive sciences, all that good stuff. Don't forget about that stuff.

57:09Charles Migos:And what would you recommend someone to learn to become this generalist? Let's say someone is currently very UX product focused, came from this background, understands user research, understands product design, but maybe is lacking because there's so much you can learn. So what are other areas you would start expanding your kind of T-shape into? Well, I would point to your program, right? What you teach for design leadership is the importance of business consideration, right? It's the, when design is behaving badly, it's because it's over idealizing around some example of end user. And we can get a little bit religious about it at times where that's not appropriate.

57:49We have to, if we are being responsible designers, take fully into account, why are we in this business anyway? This company that I work for, how do I maximize the potential for it? How do we maximize the potential for the business considerations of the customers that we serve? How do I maximize the potential around the workflows that I'm crafting for some human that's part of that overall process? That's the stuff we need to care about. And if you're not caring about that stuff today, that's where it starts. And then what you'll instantly find is if you broaden your horizons of thought in that way, you're going to see obvious places to start using these tools.

58:25And they're amazing capabilities for extraordinary outcomes. So, yeah, I think it starts there.

58:32Charles Migos:Thank you for highlighting our design in this program. Definitely anyone who is interested in more C-level positions, obviously I'm biased, but it is the best currently on the market. So we are very proud in charge this. Very kind to teach one of their modules there. So anyone who joins the program will learn a little bit of wisdom from Charles as well. Would love to go into a bit of a nitty gritty detail about more tools. We had so many questions from different types of designers about the tools that they're using. So let's see if you have any perspective on particular tools. What AI tools should I use as CAD industrial designer?

59:12So again, the one I can point to, I'll be honest. I'm not like I haven't put my hands on SolidWorks or ProEng in a million years. So I don't know what they're doing. I know that Autodesk did a lot of work with machine learning based procedural and algorithmic based design in the past. So go take a look at that stuff. But the one tool I can say today is an absolute godsend is Viscom. Viscom is amazing for the ideation phases of industrial design. and it allows you to go from your own sketches to a 3D printable model or a 3D approximation that you can bring into Rhino and start using straight away.

59:54But again, I don't know what Rhino is doing. I don't know what these other real CAD CAM systems are doing nowadays. I'm sorry.

1:00:00Charles Migos:I think that's a great place to start. Any other AI tools that you haven't mentioned maybe that help you optimize your business work, maybe not design work, but just in general, your daily life, anything that you do that may be not super well-known or may be well-known that help you with your work and life? Yeah. So the ambient note takers, not the ones that reside as fake people in our Zoom meetings, but the ones like Granola that listen passively are amazing tools, right? Like if you're doing a stakeholder interview or you're doing some field work, your ability to maintain direct eye contact and actually follow the conversation precisely and follow up on the exception or why did you say that?

1:00:43Why is that a pain point for you in your process is super important. And when you have these AI note takers that are handling all of the note taking tasks for you, your ability to maximize those interactions is just great. So those kinds of tools are, again, a godsend for design practice and UX research.

1:01:05Charles Migos:Love it. Any others that maybe didn't get a mention today apart from Claude's, Chet GPTs and Figma Make and Granola? Well, I mean, there's so many amazing, like it's ridiculous what's possible. Like the, the Nano Bananas stuff is just like, man, hard to even wrap your head around what the potential is because it's ridiculously good. I mean, it takes any subtle context and can actually do something with it. It's really nuts. So I'm like you hanging on by my fingernails at times, trying to absorb and digest the new day-to-day capabilities of all of these systems. So, again, I think we've talked about the ones that definitely matter most to me.

1:01:53If I have any other further call-outs, I'll have to do it after the fact.

1:01:56Charles Migos:Great. Let's dive into more questions about AI from our lovely community. We have to think and be aware as designers about AI and gender bias, like Laura Bates mentioned in her book, The New Age of Sexism, how the AI revolution is reinventing misogyny. What do you do on gender bias in your work? Let's start with a hard one. Why not? Well, look, it's a real thing. I think the way I approach this at, say, Unity, where I led design, is number one, to embrace that truth. and the world has seemingly moved on from a focus on DEI, I don't see any sense in that. I think maximizing people's potential is what we always need to be in the business of as leaders.

1:02:44And if you're recognizing that self-advocacy can only get individuals to a certain point, and it's the role of leadership to maximize the potential and the outcomes of teams of people and the individuals that they're comprised of, then you care and you lean in and you compensate in ways that kind of make sense. You don't do it in, I try to do it in a way which is again, outcome focused. Let's give you a set of unfair advantages in your role so you can outperform and you will clearly distinguish yourself because that's true. And so doing direct one-on-one work as a leader is the way that I addressed that.

1:03:23There's an affect that I have that you probably caught a couple of times in this conversation is that when I'm referring to an end user, I will always say she. And that serves two purposes. Number one, it reminds us all of this particular issue. And the second thing, arguably the more important one, is you know that I'm not talking about myself, right? Where the biggest crime in design is to be self-referential. I mean, we do it, of course. But our job is to be as objective as possible and to encourage objectivity from everyone that we we work with so um that is one of the ways that little affect uh helps in in that in that regard um but uh when i left unity um the the top tier of leaders that i left in my place and the head of design uh was a an amazing designer happens to be a woman that i worked with for many years and i took that approach to developing her career to make sure that she could stand in that position afterwards.

1:04:25So true for every cultural denomination, true for every gender. It's just something we should do.

1:04:32Charles Migos:What do you think on the theory that to make AI more diverse, we as diverse communities should use more of AI because at the end of the day, it learns from its users. So the more, I suppose, we will stay away from AI, the more we will learn from the same types of users. yeah that's the problem with ai is it's an echo chamber right and it reflects the the people that have collected and collated and been responsible for the internet at large and predominantly men primarily white male and and you see that i am tired of seeing like coquettish like sexified content in my linkedin feed i i think it's horrible uh to be honest with you and i hate the examples that it sets for my own daughter, right?

1:05:18Like we need to be thinking, I don't know, much more maturely about it. And there's a lot of work, a lot of row to hoe for us. I think it starts with us. We have to be a united front. We have to continue to push for what matters and not to do it. The problem is if it smells idealistic, then it'll be ignored. If it's connected with business outcome, it will be honored. So try to contextualize things in ways which are meaningful for business, and you'll have success.

1:05:46Charles Migos:I so agree with you that we as designers should push the ethical and sustainability or whatever agenda we feel like is needed, and it is needed, through the lens of business because it is the easiest way to push it and make actually companies change. We actually published the report on the role of chief design officers and overall design in the boardroom, and that's beyond the impact of business and finance and everything else. that design can bring, there are a few things that are very important that we should be advocating as designers, which is ethics, which is diversity, which is collaborative environments and things that are very natural to us as creatives from the first day we started our jobs.

1:06:31Charles Migos:And now that we raise to leadership positions, we should keep those qualities integral to any leadership team in any boardroom. and if we won't do it, no one else will. And at the end of the day, we are all using the products of the companies that we work in. So we better bring all of these great qualities that we have as a design and creative community to the top level to make sure it's actually better for all of us as a humanity and society. I'm going to connect one. I'm going to build on that just a tiny little bit. It connects with something you asked me earlier. So, you know, the theoretical limit of what generative AI before it reaches general intelligence stages is the zeitgeist.

1:07:12Like that's the, that's, that's kind of like the asymptotic limit of what it can do. Humans are different. Humans demand change. Every organism on this earth demands change, if you believe in evolutionary theory, right? And we as humans are the best example of that. Who's going to push past the zeitgeist? Who's going to push into uncharted territories? It's going to be humans. Why? Think about our social fabrics, how we are informed by music and media and the environments that we find ourselves within. Our cohorts as designers, our cohorts as lovers of music, our cohorts as fans of art that we all love and enjoy.

1:07:54There's no AI system in the world that can synthesize that stuff. And we can't even as humans synthesize that concretely, but we can certainly viscerally project past it. And we are going to be guided by that innate sense, and our technologies are going to be guided by that innate sense. So the more we adhere to these human goals, the more impact we're going to have on these technologies as they continue to emerge. So it's not a done deal, but recognize that they have their limits and recognize the role of humans and us as a special class of humans as designers in this process around technology.

1:08:33we will be hugely impactful and can change the world.

1:08:38Charles Migos:Oh, yes, to that. And I do believe that the imagination, the creativity, all these very human things are the ones that will be the changemakers of the future because everything else, everyone has access to. Everyone has access to ChatGPT. Everyone has access to all the tools. But our personal imagination, our own creativity, it's something that is very unique to us. So therefore, us as creatives and designers are the ones who can produce something that hasn't been produced yet because we are the only holders of that and we should definitely maximize that. What do you think on how the eye of the consumer will change now that anything visual can be possible and how could that influence the way we consume visuals?

1:09:19Well, I'm not quite sure. Again, it's like a point to the novelty. People are going, isn't it amazing that the system can do this? In fact, it is, right? Of course, it's astounding. But don't fool yourself. Like that wasn't intentional, like, or was semi intentional, it was sort of a proof of concept or whatever. Like real work will happen in real work. Can't be, I would say like all facets of the work cannot be replaced by generative AI and one person driving it. If you're making a piece of architecture, well, you're not going to generate that, right? That's still going to be a function of methodological approaches and proceduralism as expressed in 3D to actually define an architectural development or a manufactured product or any story that you're going to tell kind of around those things.

1:10:13so the the eye of the consumer uh i think right now she's sort of like us amazed at all of the possibility yeah the real work is going to carry through right they're like everyone looks at what worldlapse is doing it's like it's amazing i can make my own game well no you can create a g splat a giant g splat and run around in it like that's a game but that's not what games are right like games are multiplayer experiences with emergent qualities and the ability to interact with things and there are very complex systems around all of it. And the reason that we bought our Switch 2s to play games and Nintendo has its own game engine with its own opinionated game systems and it wants that to last for 10 years, World Labs is going to change that in the next five years and probably not in the next 10.

1:10:58So what it can do is amazing, but don't kid yourself. There is a lot of great stuff that we can do right now. So my entreatment for the group is to not focus so much on the novelty, to focus on what's possible and then maximize for what's possible today. Look at the new tech, think about systems and conventional things, combine those things, solve real problems, and then the consumer interest will follow.

1:11:27Charles Migos:What do you think about AI music and AI movies? And I'm not a musician, but some AI music, especially when they unfortunately utilizes the the work of real artists and kind of create new genres and new styles it's very impressive where where you're on with ai generated art in general well look i mean the ability to kind of like here's an example piece of music give me my version of that you know that's background audio tracks it's the things you used to spend like 500 for for a volume set of like stock media of whatever kind and then you would just roll it behind whatever video production or whatever i kind of think about it like that um you can get things which are very sophisticated and nuanced out of out of ai um unfortunately it's appropriating a lot of prior art um as part of that but it can do astounding things if you think about it for you know audio in the realms that i occupy with the uh in the markets that i'm trying to serve it's not just about music it's about what music is soundtracks yes ambient sounds specific and precise sounds that would normally be done by foley departments like those things are are easy to be generated today and so i believe in that on the so back to the topic of ai as art i've actually seen some emergent aesthetic that couldn't actually be done any other way so it's happening um it's um the stuff that tends to get the most airplay are the things which are kind of like rotely derivative like those if you go and watch traditional linear broadcast television and you look at the commercials that are part of that uh i abandoned that sphere long ago but if ever i want to watch a sports game obviously i'll have to see it if i'm in a hotel room i'll have to see them uh there's no need for like a full production story behind those things anymore generative i I can absolutely give you a Toblerone commercial, right?

1:13:29If it's not a particularly artful one. But for anything else, anything that has real artistic voice and value, it's going to require craft. It's going to require thought. And that thought will be, I think, obvious and evident in the work. So the fact that you can hallucinate all these fantastical things, and it's like being on mushrooms constantly when you go into these systems and looking at the product of their work. Visually astounding, but not meaningful yet. But I have seen some aesthetics emerge which are fresh and new. And I think that the next generation of creatives that are actually learning their skills with these generative AI tools, they're going to reveal it to us.

1:14:14We're just not there yet. We're kind of in the, remember like the early days of iPhone, like the virtual lighter or the virtual beer or the accelerometer-based art machine, the apps that used to be on the iPhone, that's where we are, right? And what it's going to become, who knows? But I'm here for it. And I'm starting to see signals that there'll be a new art form, there'll be a new medium around it, and it will be something different and fresh and valuable.

1:14:42Charles Migos:On the note of AI art, a shout out to Luba Elliott, an incredible curator of AI artists who has been doing meetups for creative AI community for 15 or more years when AI wasn't a thing. And speaking of aesthetics, it's incredible actually to see how that community was generating this very different type of art and still is generating very different type of art, which as any art is bizarre and wonderful and uniquely personal, but in terms of kind of giving a new space for creativity there is definitely something that can be just unique to ai and doesn't need to replace what currently has it can be just its own same as what happened with digital art and 100 right it's like not everyone has an appreciation for mark rothko because it's all perfectly abstract and it's full of actually cognitive and perceptive theory that's what drives all of all of his work but you can't tell that by looking at it and if you don't study or not a fan of modern art you'll you'll miss that point go like who's that idiot my three-year-old could do that to do that art.

1:15:46Kind of the same rules apply here. So people that did algorithmic art or procedural art, they're asking real questions about the nature of data and media and it carries an art. That's what makes art art and not decoration. A lot of people though, what they're doing is purely decorative.

1:16:10Charles Migos:I wish we had another hour to speak. What is art and what is not what defines that something is beautiful. I heard on one conversation that any art, everything is art, just some is good and some is bad. So everything that is produced technically can be art is just a question of how good it is. Would love to just spend the last few minutes talking about your reflection on design leadership overall throughout your career, because it felt like you had incredible different parts of your life where you had to learn a lot about who you are and what your role is within the organization or within design process from being a leader within company to now being a founder and leading the team.

1:16:54Charles Migos:Would love to hear any reflections that you had on design leadership overall and your role. What lessons did you learn in kind of these different parts what did you change that made you a better design leader at each stage moving from designer to design leader and then moving from design leader within the organization to a designer founder yeah i think for me it's probably three things and the first of them was um that recognition of where i was over idealizing you know what i mean like the you know ringing that bell around what's usable and what's not and encouraging everyone to think in very sort of superficial ways about what usability is where usability is an empirically measurable state there are criteria that are that do not change and not all of them matter equally and you you should understand them well enough to know to apply them where it matters against systems that are going to be used every day and systems that are used infrequently and you have to be able to remember what you did before and get up to speed to do what you're going to do or whatever.

1:17:58So those kinds of considerations was where it started, right? Realizing that it's greater than you, right? It's not about you and your talent. Yeah, we all want to make a name for ourselves and all of you recognize for our brilliance and our talent. But the first most important step is getting over yourself and understanding the importance of the design function that you represent. Step number one. Step number two is incorporating the business thinking into what you choose to do, right? Because the struggle for any company is always around focus. And you and your role in design, I think, plays a very essential role in maintaining focus on what matters.

1:18:37And that set of factors around the business of what you're trying to do and why really matters and should inform design decisions. You should be able to speak to them in what you're doing. So that was the next leveling up. Now, as I mentioned, when you do your homework, it's always clear to people. So if you're thinking about things in a non-precious way, you're thinking about business considerations, and you are bringing an actual perspective on the end user with real data behind them, quantitative or qualitative, now you're in a position to be very impactful in the organization that you're operating within.

1:19:13And that's where leadership starts. and all leaders, there's this kind of shift in this. And there's like, I experienced it too in my youthful days, that arrogance of youth where I'm like, I'm not recognized enough. I'm not rewarded enough for my talents and my impact. And maybe that's true and maybe that's not. But I'll tell you the people that have been most impactful as leaders of any kind, they're the ones that simply were trying to do the best thing possible and encouraged people around them to do the best thing possible and involve them. in doing the best thing possible and that's leadership and when i would when i would survey for leader profiles in my own companies and in my own teams i would always look for the people that were leaders already and they were they were leading already because they focused on what mattered and what mattered was of course that outcome and and what would be most impactful relative to that outcome these are the leaders um sorry those are the leadership qualities i wanted to see.

1:20:13And they were always demonstrated to me before the promotion, not after. Other people have different philosophies around that. And even as I was saying, we need to develop people's careers and be very attentive to their careers on a one-on-one basis. That's always the way I thought about it. Merit and the demonstrated impact of a unique individual for leadership purpose. Now, if you're doing all those things, you're enabling people around you, you will find yourself applying design method in different ways. So where you might have been responsible for solutioning and putting together, you know, wireframes, comps, flows, prototypes, you're now maybe dealing with human elements and you're trying to deal with the mix of talents that are best suited for a particular design program task that has to be accomplished in a certain timeframe.

1:21:10So you think about, again, all of those same things. What's the intent? What matters? Why? And for whom? And now you're making choices about the humans you're going to involve in that process. And then again, if you're being very smart about not just your function, the other thing I'd recommend is leadership. Number one, the thing is you don't have problems as leaders anymore. Like when you're a leader, everyone else's problem is your problem. And it doesn't stop with design. Your engineering leader partner, their problems, they're your problems too. Your product leader partner, their problems are your problems too.

1:21:42And helping them solve their problems and learning to speak in their voice is how we win the seat at the table as design function. And it's not about winning a seat at the design table. It's just appreciating that's how we get to great. and so in order to get to great that's how we should operate this is brilliant advice to

1:22:03Charles Migos:wrap this insightful and deep and rich conversations that we had before i let you go we have one last question that we'll ask all the guests that come on our podcast which is a bit philosophical charles if you could change one thing in the world what would it be wow i you know the i think the thing that I appreciate right now is we're all very self-interested in a way that I don't like to see. And so I want to see much more empathy and cross-consideration kind of at the societal level. And as we are guardians of design practice and design function, obviously our job is to make sure that we don't trend that way either, right?

1:22:49Like it is, there's a greater good to always be considered. There is the fellowship of the team that we work within. There is the consideration of the end user and the potential around what they are doing. The world needs demonstrations of why that matters. So I want to see more of it in the world and therefore I want to see more of it kind of from us. And also less futurism, more pragmatism, please. Because the future is the thing that reveals itself to us. It isn't predicted. it.

1:23:19Charles Migos:Brilliant, Anson. Great advice. Thank you so much, Charles, for all of your wisdom, knowledge, practical advice, tips, and just reflection on life, AI leadership, and everything in between. It has been such a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for being with us. Any last words for our community? Anywhere people should find you? What people should search for? Where should they find intangible AI? Yeah, I mean, go take a look at what I'm doing, of course, but I'm here for this community. So please find me on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out at any time. There's a large volume of communication in my role as a founder and doing what we're doing, but I will always find time to get back.

1:23:58Might not be super responsive, but I'm here for any questions you have. Any way I can enable our design community, I'm here for it. There's a reason I'm extended faculty with the Katarina's program. It's because I believe in it deeply, and I'm I'm here for it. So please find me online and thank you all for your time. Thanks for caring.

1:24:18Charles Migos:Thank you so much, Charles. If you find anything insightful, helpful, useful, provocative, challenging, whatever it brought you, please share it with others. We love hearing what you find the most helpful so we can guide more conversation this way. So please share your thoughts, insights, because you learn once by listening, you learn twice by sharing. So by sharing, you learn even more and process all this information so please share anything that you found helpful and thanks again everyone and until next time bye bye everyone