Bonus Episode: 30 years of design with Wert&Co, live in NYC featuring Paola Antonelli, Mark Wilson,Kate Aronowitz, Mike Davidson, and Meaghan Choi

21:38Mark Wilson:Well, I would just say, you know, But the democratization is so interesting because we did, we democratized all the tools and we democratized none of the platforms. And that gap is just in a nutshell, kind of what's broken about the individual's ability to communicate. But within that, we've seen a mass undercutting of the media. I don't know if even people in this room, people are often surprised, you know, it's like 70 % or more of journalist jobs over the last 20 years have disappeared. And then just in the past few years, sorry, I'm like really being a downer journalist right now. Just in the past few months, since companies like Google have turned on AI summaries or perplexity has turned on summaries, many, many, many of my peers and most publications can't actually generate sort of the traffic revenue they need and the eyeballs that drive advertisers.

22:25Mark Wilson:And so the entire business has been undercut. But the funny thing, it's not the tools. I mean, AI is extremely interesting and fascinating, and I'm not one of those doomsayers, but I was thinking there's so much horrible going on all around us that AI is not able to lift me up. But 2011, by the way, missed Twitter so much. I think by exhibitions. And in 2011, I had curated a show called Talk to Me that was about the communication between people and objects. and it was really full of hope because of all the interfaces and what they could do also from the artistic viewpoint. I feel that, yes, today there's a lot of excitement, but the tools are more powerful, and therefore when they're used in a twisted way, they are more powerfully damaging, but that has nothing to do with the tool itself.

23:11Right now I think a lot about the fact that since deepfakes are so convincing, Maybe the only truth is when you can touch the person next to you. At least for a while, flesh is going to be the final test. But what can happen with AI is beautiful. And it doesn't have to be necessarily phantasmagoric. I want to talk very quickly about a beautiful use of AI that is very simple. I mean, they started with Dali. And I think that now they're using something, but nothing terrible. Domestic data streamers, they're called. They're based in Barcelona. And they use AI to create memories, videos and photos of memories that have never been recorded for people that, for instance, were in prison during the war.

23:56There are migrants that are suffering from Alzheimer's. So it's beautiful how these personal truths that are not absolute truths maybe are the best expression of what deep fakes and deep truths can do. Well, on that optimistic, more or less note, thank you, Paola and Mark. We love having you up here.

24:14Mark Wilson:Thank you. All right. So next up, we will be shifting our focus to the present and future of design. The teams, the individual contributors, and the leaders who are navigating this big evolution in real time. Let's welcome our second panel, Kate Aronowitz, Megan Choi, and Mike Davidson, three leaders who have different perspectives on where design's headed and what it means to build meaningful careers in a rapidly changing landscape.

24:49Kate Aronowitz is a design partner at GV, Google Ventures for those uninitiated, where she helps companies of all sizes build design-driven cultures. Megan Choi is a product designer at Anthropic, focused on developer experiences for emerging technologies like AI and cloud computing, including her work on Claude Code. Mike Davidson is VP of Design and User Research at Microsoft AI with more than two decades leading design at companies including Disney, Twitter, and ESPN. Kate, Megan, Mike, welcome to Design Better. Thank you. We're very excited to have you here. So we were talking about the past 30 years where it already felt like the world is changing, things were evolving quickly, but now if we're thinking about the next five years, feels like we're at the cusp of this even steeper exponential curve where design is, according to some, likely to potentially create a general artificial intelligence, massive changes to the economy, and change jobs and culture.

25:50So we want to talk a bit about what role design plays in our next chapter. So I spend a lot of my time with founders. They've got their first idea. They've earned their first round of money from an investment. And then it's time to get serious. They've got the pressure. They've got a scale. They need to really find product market fit and take off. And so while most of us see the consumer result of design, I work with really technical founders. And it's fun to see that every workflow now needs to be well-designed. It's not just about, oh, my phone should look nice. It's like if I'm a security tech, I want my workflow to feel good and work well.

26:30If I'm a lawyer, I want to be able to publish my time card in a better way. So I'm seeing design kind of revolutionize all sorts of workflows and founders are calling immediately saying how much they want design. And they're doing it in interesting ways. So I used to just place designers immediately with startups, but that got really complicated. Now I connect them with agencies. We can get back to that in a moment. But the design folks that they're looking for, they're looking for systems designers now. They're looking for brand designers earlier than I used to see. They're looking for UX research.

27:03They're really looking for design to play a strategy role earlier in their startup. And on the AI note, it's removed this barrier between like, I have this idea, but I don't know how to get it out and express it. And these founders are coming with these amazing ideas. And they're not looking to replace designers. In fact, it almost builds empathy. They're like, I had this great idea for this app. Oh, it doesn't really work, but I expressed it. And now I need design. So I'm actually very optimistic at these early companies. the role of design is being put into place pretty well and very early. Mike, I'm curious about the composition of design teams and roles.

27:40They certainly changed a lot over the years. There's a lot more specialization. Also seems like now with AI, there's this blurring of boundaries. Can you talk to us about roles and team composition and where things stand today? Yeah, absolutely. So since the beginning, we've all struggled with this kind of Venn diagram of like, what does the engineer do? What does the PM do? and what does the designer do and what does the researcher do, right? And at some companies, the circles don't even overlap, right? It's like full specialization. And in other companies, they overlap somewhat, but there's always like arguments around those overlapping areas, right?

28:13And so I think over the last 30 years, some designers, I feel like, have retreated into the most remote parts of their circle. And they've said like, I'm not a code person. I don't want to touch that. I could learn HTML and CSS, but that's not what I do. I'm a designer. And that's been fine, I think, for the most part so far. Like there's been enough jobs in the industry so that we can have people who are very technical as designers and people who are not very technical as designers. But one of the really, really nice things over the last couple of years through products like GitHub Copilot and CloudCode is not only is that not an excuse anymore, but it's fun to actually code your work now.

28:46It's fun to have an idea on a Saturday morning on your couch and have an actual working live product before the weekend is over, right? Without even knowing code. So what I see is we're moving from an era of specialization to an area of extreme generalization. And at Microsoft, we're starting to call this sort of person the full stack product maker. And this person could have a product management background. They can have a design background. They can have a research background. They can have an engineering background. But the point is we can do so much more with smaller groups of people now. And that actually feels better.

29:19You know, Kate and I especially have been in this industry for like, what, 25 years now. We've built these giant apparatuses, apparati, apparatus, apparatus, around product building to the point where it's like, all right, well, let's build this tiny little feature. Then you look around and you're like, there's 30 people building this tiny little feature. You know, there's like two designers and 25 engineers and a couple of PMs. And you're like, damn, did we really need all those people to do this little thing? And now we're kind of getting to the point where we can do that all with a really, really small group again of tightly woven creative people who can do great things very quickly and at high quality.

29:52So I'm super, super excited about that. Megan, you work on Claude Code. I love Claude. I've been using a lot just for things with my kids and then also for our own work. And I'm curious how you think about maybe those designers who are just starting to dip their toes into the development waters or are curious about it. And I think we run workshops with companies where sometimes they just frankly don't have the time. They're too busy with their day job to even play around with it. But I wonder if you think, just given that you're so deeply involved with the product, how you've seen folks who are just kind of into it have some success.

30:22I think there is a little bit of a preconception that code is unaccessible or it's scary. And I think that actually prevents a lot of people from even trying in the first place. And I think that's actually the biggest barrier. It's almost like when you have to go exercise and you really don't want to. It's like the biggest barrier is actually leaving your house to go to the gym. And so for coding, I think it's very, very similar. Once you try using one of these products, you realize it's truly just a conversation. You don't need to know any code. You just need to be able to speak human language.

30:53You could even draw a picture, take a picture with your phone and put it into one of these engines. And it can produce something very working for you, something really great, actually. And so my biggest recommendation would be like, be curious, be interested and just try. You'll get somewhere. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

31:16If you've ever felt like the hardest part of being a leader isn't the work itself, but actually getting everyone to work together, well, we've got something coming up for you. Eli and I have partnered with our friends at September Works on the September Workshop Leadership Excursion. It's a two-day gathering in Sonoma on September 28th and 29th. And let me set the scene. This is wine country at its most beautiful, rolling hills, golden light, the kind of place where you can finally hear yourself think and walk away genuinely inspired. The format is intimate by design. Just 40 liters are gonna be there.

31:54It's no stage. It's not really an audience format. It's very conversation first. It's the kind of room that challenges you to think bigger about your work and your craft. And Eli and I will be there in person the whole time. So this is a real chance to hang out with us and swap ideas and get into the good stuff together. The lineup is incredible. A few are voices that you've heard right here on Design Better, including Paul Dichter, one of the lead writers on Stranger Things. Bill Burnett, the author of Designing Your Life, Designing Your Work Life, and Creating a Meaningful Life. And Andrew Evans of The Magic Patio.

32:30There are only a handful of tickets available, and they're going fast. So head to september.works slash excursion2026. That's september.works slash excursion2026 to see the full lineup and reserve your spot before they're gone. Design Better is supported by Masterclass. Lately, I've been thinking about what it actually takes to get better at a craft, not just grinding reps, but learning to see your work the way that a master does. That's the thing that Masterclass does better than anything else that I've found. I took Bob Iger's class on leadership and strategy expecting business tactics, and instead I got a Masterclass in decision-making under uncertainty, which, if you're building products or leading a design team right now, is basically the whole job.

33:20What I love is how directly Masterclass maps to the things that we care about as designers. Frank Gehry breaks down how he actually thinks through form and space, Anna Wintour teaches creativity and leadership from decades of shaping culture at scale. And if you're curious where AI fits into creative work, Masterclass has been adding classes that dig into exactly that tension. How the best in our fields are adapting without losing what makes their work theirs and special. It's not theory. It's people who've spent careers at the top of design, business, storytelling, showing you how they actually think.

33:58Plans start at$10 a month, billed annually, with unlimited access to over 200 classes, all of them very valuable. And every new membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there's no real risk in finding out if it clicks with you. Right now, Design Better listeners get 15 % off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash designbetter. That's 15 % off right now at masterclass.com slash designbetter. Go to masterclass.com slash designbetter to get 15 % off.

34:35And now, back to the show.

34:42You know, something we've seen so many times at a lot of different companies that we've visited or worked within is design has operated on an island. And now I think people have found the boats and they found their way to the other islands. They're very closely integrated with product managers, very closely integrated with engineering. And AI is going to accelerate that a lot. I'm curious what you think that relationship is going to look like and or is already looking like how that's changing. One of the things that I've always liked to say, especially around large groups of non-designers, is designers don't have a monopoly on taste.

35:19We don't. We think we do. We're pretty good at it. Maybe by default, we might have like better taste than some other professions, but we don't have a monopoly on it, especially today in the world. There are so many great observers of design culture that are not designers. I remember being in my fifth grade class and using the word. So this was in, I don't know what year this was. Let's say like 1989 or something like that. And I used the word font in a paper. And my English teacher crossed it out and gave me a demerit for using a word that didn't exist because she had never heard the word font.

35:52before. I think it means something else, but like she hadn't heard it used as like a type. That was the extent of the knowledge of design in the world back then. But like everybody knows what a font is right now. Everybody has opinions on fonts right now, right? Because we see so many billboards and we see so many websites and we see so many apps, right? And that's how you build taste. Nobody is born with taste. Zero human beings in the history of the world have ever been born with taste. It's all about your ability to observe the world around you and make sense out of it and build and shape new culture out of it.

36:21So I think it's really exciting that now we have a bus full of people, some of whom are designers, some of whom are researchers, some of whom are engineers, some of whom are marketers, some of whom are different disciplines entirely that can participate in the process of building culture to a degree that hasn't existed before. And the only thing that is required from us as designers is just opening the door and letting people in and not being afraid and not being threatened. Trust me, every discipline is threatened by AI in one way or another. Think about engineers. Code is what engineers do all day.

36:55And code is the best thing that AI can do right now. It's so good. Like if AI could do nothing but code, we'd be fine for the next 30 years. That's how good AI is at code. So like, don't be threatened by it. You know, have an open mind. Realize that this is the first major change, I think, in the design landscape since the beginning of the internet, essentially. They want a bunch of very traditional designers from print and TV and broadcast, how to kind of open up their minds and explore this new low resolution at the time world of the Internet. Look how it worked out. One part, too, to focus on in terms of the actual division in between roles is that those are really just artificial barriers that we've created to categorize people.

37:35There was a point in time when you only had a fixed amount of time, and we still all have that right now, to be able to learn a specific skill set. with AI, that actually really reduces the amount of time to get a first draft at something. It doesn't mean you'll be an expert, but it means you can try something new very easily and they get a feel for it. And so in that sense, I think when we think about the teams that build products today, very similar to how Mike said, the makeup of them is actually a lot more fluid. Like my title might be designer, but I might spend 90 % of my time coding for a project because that's what it calls for.

38:04Or my PM's title might be PM, but they actually spend a lot of their time designing because that's actually something that they're really great at. And it's a niche or a problem that we're working on that their skill is best at. And so I kind of think of our titles as a starting point that we're all comfortable with and we know right now, but the future framework is going to be a lot more around just being curious about wanting to build something and then pursuing it and then just finding your way there as a collective. One thing I feel very passionate about in building AI products is that I truly think it actually emphasizes human value.

38:35We focus a lot on like it emphasizing technology, but in that experience, you actually have to learn what the people you're working with are really good at. I learned that one of my engineers is really good at sound design. And so he made all the sound effects for one of our apps. I learned another one of my product managers is randomly really good at AssyArt. So he just helped make AssyArt. That is amazing. It's amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. And you just learn people beyond their titles and you get to see people's true expertise at what they're interested in. And so I think it's actually a beautiful emphasis on human creativity in the process and a little bit less restricting than what we've had to operate until now.

39:09We're thinking about history and kind of barriers coming up and down. It reminds me, 10 years ago, I think Lyft was looking for a new head of design, and a lot of us were coming to visit and see what they had going on. And they were so proud to come and show, and they say, look what we've done. We have built a design studio, and you need a badge to get into it. Only the designers can get into this room. And they were so excited about that. And I was like, oh my God, actually, that's really terrible. At the time, we had to signal to design, yes, you're so important that we will build your own studio and only designers can get it.

39:46You can imagine, actually, I think they took the walls down very quickly. And now we've come to this place where the thing I'm looking for for startup designers is you can't be too precious. It doesn't mean don't bring what you have to the table. But if you're too precious and you can't wear many hats and collaborate, it just won't work. I work a lot with the Savannah College of Art and Design. and for the first time, I think, in 25 years, they've completely redone their foundations curriculum. So every design student has to take the Siam four or five core courses and they've just completely redone it.

40:18They're launching it this fall and they're thinking differently about the core skills that a designer needs to have that won't become automated. It used to be very much like drawing one, drawing two, drawing from real life, deep color theory. And now the curriculum is focused on collaboration and teamwork. It's about communication and it's about problem solving because those are the three core things that everyone needs to do. So instead of sketching, you know, can you take this plant and make it look like it's on the paper? It's can you draw an idea on a napkin? How quickly can you communicate an idea?

40:53How can you use your language to bring other people along for the idea? How can you collaborate cross-functionally with teams? I'm really inspired by that, that we're changing what we see as the foundation of what makes a good designer. Now overlaying all of that, there will be craft, but you'll learn that in your majors. But the idea around communication and idea and curation and bringing people along and together, I think there's just no substitute for that. I think also if you expanded into like what products won't be automated, that's interesting as well, right? Like I just read an article the other day about a company that wants to build this technology so that it can generate like 5 ,000 automated podcasts a day.

41:31Is anybody asking for that? Do we need 5 ,000 more a day? Like, I feel like there are already too many. And the ones that are really good are amazing. And so what I think is going to happen is as a lot of these companies rush to automate everything, it's going to put a higher premium on the human made podcasts like this one, like your favorite one that you listen today. And it's actually going to give more power and influence to the humans who put the care and consideration into that product. Right. And so I'm actually kind of excited about that because I think that's going to be a wave that just kind of like washes over and it is like gone, which would be nice.

42:03But at the same time, there still are nuggets of interestingness in the idea of automatic. I wouldn't call them podcasts. I'll call them like conversational audio segments, right? Like there was a town in Massachusetts called Melrose who decided to take all of their like sewer permits, I think, and like land use permits and some police blotter stuff and whatever, and just feed it into notebook LLM and create a podcast out of it for the people in the town to listen to. And it's a little like 10-minute podcasts. And they were kind of entertaining, right? And like, you wouldn't have known if you live in this town that's underserved by local news because of what has happened to local news, as Mark said, over the last 10 years, you've turned this really boring, inaccessible format of like government documents into this digestible 10-minute thing where you can kind of like figure out what's going on in your town.

42:52Now, I just checked on that podcast, however, and they only generated five episodes and they haven't. So I don't think it worked out, but there's like something interesting in there. I don't think we're going to be in a world of like 5 ,000 automated podcasts a day, but AI itself is ushering in new formats that may be interesting for us as designers to kind of play with and see what sticks. One of the most important seal sets is probably to be flexible and nimble. I might be like kind of cachet to say, but I'll be like, oh, I actually don't know. I think we don't know what we're going to need.

43:24Like the industry is actually changing that fast. That what skill set is going to be important six months from now, we actually can't predict it. That's how fast these models are changing. That's how fast people actually adopting them into their lives. One of the biggest transformations I've actually seen, having worked in emerging tech for the last 10 years, is how shockingly quickly people, like the general population, has adopted and accepted this technology when we know so little about it. So little about how it works. So little that we can't even predict what it's going to do next and where it's going to take us next.

43:54We're kind of just along it for the ride. And so I think the most important skill set we can all have is to understand that we probably don't know what we need to hold dear and what is the foundational skill set. And we just need to be a little bit comfortable with being uncomfortable in not knowing. And then we can just be nimble and adapt as time goes and try and correct it and direct it in a direction that we hope is good for the world. Let's stick into this a little bit more because, you know, as we think back of what the discipline of design has been the past 30 years, shaping craft, trying to figure out our workflow together, figure out how we collaborate with engineers, product, etc.

44:33But it occurs to me that to continue on with our UX and design and research skill set is very myopic, that we need to bring something much deeper. Can you think of disciplines that designers need to dig into further? Some that come to mind for me, like philosophy, as we start to consider ethics. Do we need to know more about law? Maybe there are many other disciplines that I can't even think of right now that designers need to have some awareness of and proficiency as we start to influence the world more than we have in the past 30 years. I might be a little biased here, given that I work at Anthropic, but I think the two big disciplines are trade is a big one and policy.

45:19I think physical trade and physical hardware is one of the biggest limitations of technology development. It's like much deeper than people typically go. But just physical chips and like the physical power that we have access to right now is one of the limiting factors of kind of this invention. And it's more foreign to us, especially in this technological age, but that's kind of where we're couched right now. So understanding where all those resources come from, understanding how those resources get spread across the world, how it affects foreign policy, how it affects local policy, and then also how it shapes what we're building actually is a really, really important part of this process.

45:57And then I think we've learned over the past maybe 15 years that technology policy, especially safety and privacy policy, is so important and so hard to walk back after it's out there. And so as we're really just quickly releasing this technology, I think we have a huge responsibility to try and put in the right guardrails. Of course, as was mentioned before, we're probably not going to get it right, but it's worth spending extra time to figure out where the right places might be that we absolutely need to put them in. Or even looking back to our predecessors with all that optimism and wondering like, oh, if we knew that that optimism would result in this, how can we do it differently?

46:37Or how can we learn so that we get to a place where we're finding more before it gets out there? You think about all the people who are using AI as therapy today and like OpenAI leaning into that. I think that's incredibly positive in some ways because maybe they wouldn't have reached out to someone otherwise. But I also think it's incredibly negative because an AI bot didn't take the Hippocratic Oath. It doesn't know how to reach out for harm. It can't access resources. So I just think policy and trade are just really where I'd focus a lot of my time. I would say, I mean, as designers, we're supposed to be trained to think about the human on the other side.

47:08But I think as things speed up and they get more automated, like, unfortunately, I'm seeing a lot of user researchers. The teams are shrinking and a lot of them are out of work. As an investment team, we see tools come in all the time. You're like, replace your user researcher. We're going to have like an AI bot conduct interviews with humans. But I think it's probably really important for the designers to kind of remember when the human needs to be in the loop and when to get out and actually talk to real people about the real effects of the products that we're having. Because it's going to be very easy to sit behind a screen and just see the data come through and have it digested and analyzed.

47:43So I think it's really not losing sight of who we're designing for and making sure there's enough flesh on flesh contact, as Paulo would say. Megan, you just mentioned the privacy aspect. And I was recently playing around with Comet Browser. And you flip it on and it immediately wants to take over your entire Chrome profile. I'm like, whoa, we haven't even gone on a first date yet. And you want access to everything. It just feels like way overboard. But I'm just wondering, how do we frame that? And then how do we also, any of you could take either of these directions, privacy aspect, or thinking about how we educate the next generation of designers to think more ethically.

48:21One part of it is recognizing you, who you are, and the audience that we need to protect the most are very, very different. In the age of growing up with technology, most people in their 20s or in their teens will click accept immediately. They'll accept everything. They'll share their entire, they'll share wild things. Every single thing you could imagine, it's online and it's great. It builds an entire identity and profile and presence for them. All the things that we used to be concerned about, like maybe people won't share this data because they're nervous. No, they will share it and they will share it all the time.

48:51And I think sharing by default and assuming people will share by default is a very different mental model than trying to get more people to share. Because that's where we've been for the past 10 years. And so if we assume that way, then we're going to design these interfaces extremely differently. We're going to approach building product very differently. And I think we have to kind of pivot our lens. Like if it was my responsibility and not to teach someone about what it is to use this product safely. If I like took the amount of care I would take to someone who I knew personally right beside me and wanted them to be safe out there with this technology.

49:23How would I prevent them from going into dangerous directions? How would I frame it so that they felt optimistic about it? But they also knew kind of the extent of what was possible here, both positive and negative. So I think it's a little bit of a reframing of the conversation. And I also think it's remembering that everyone's online, everything's accessible. And that's kind of the default that we live in today. First of all, click no, Eli, on that permissions box. I think Megan's absolutely right. Like most people will just click yes and give a lot of permissions away that they probably shouldn't.

49:58And we try not to design for that. We try not to take that permission for granted. One thing we like saying at Microsoft AI is that we are on team human. And if we can't help the human beings who use our product flourish, then we're not doing our job. And so you, everybody in this room, everybody in this audience, like you will pick over the next five or 10 years, which AI tools and which companies you actually trust with your data. And we and every other company is asking for a lot more data than we ever have in these products, right? Most products don't ask for a ton, right? Like even Google, Google knows a lot about you, but every search is pretty much fresh for the most part, right?

50:35But these products are so intimate with the way that they actually intersect with your life. The therapy use case is one of them, that it's really important for us to not abuse that trust, because as soon as that trust is abused once, it's all over. And even worse than that, it doesn't even have to be abused by Anthropic or by Microsoft. It could be abused by another company that is putting themselves out there as a Vanguard AI companion company, right? And if something goes wrong there, that kind of poisons the well for everybody else, the people that are doing it right, the people that are trying to be very conservative about what we ask for and when.

51:07I think technology has never asked to be this close to you before. And it's asking now. And as a user, you should think very, very long and hard about who you trust when it comes to using these products because they're going to create incredible value in your life. But they are also going to require incredible amounts of trust. I want to zoom a little bit further into the future and do just sort of a little mental exercise with you. Maybe you've heard of Demis Hassabis' notion of radical abundance, that with AI constantly being able to do the tedium of production or creating of special things for humans, everyone in theory has access to the best education and in theory, great medical care.

51:56and beautiful objects and so forth. So this idea of radical abundance is really gonna scramble our brain and our notion, our relationship to the world. So things won't be rare. And rarity is a really important concept in the human experience. It's how we signal to one another to say, I'm a potentially good mate. I could be prosperous. I'm into this thing. Let's be birds of a feather and come together. What's going to be rare in five years? What's our relationship to rarity? I struggle with that question a lot, maybe even every day, honestly, because I feel like it's already too hard to find what's good out there.

52:37And especially with so much content being generated at almost zero cost, even if something good is like right in front of you, sometimes you miss it because of all the other stuff that has been put between you and what's literally like three, four feet in front of you. So I think it comes down to kind of what we talked about earlier, the human beings who are still willing to put their heart and soul into something. Music has had an interesting effect on me in this regard. That might be weird. Maybe you guys agree. Maybe you don't. But when I saw my first image generated with Dali, I was like, this is amazing.

53:07This is great. This is unbelievable. When I saw my first short video generated by Mid Journey, I was like, oh, my God. Fantastic. Wonderful. I can't wait to use this. When I heard my first song that was fully generated, I was like, I do not want that. A huge music fan grew up in Seattle during Heart of Grunge. I just picture the process of writing a song and an album as this like months long slog through your emotions that ends up in this beautiful like piece of vinyl that you can listen to for the rest of your life. Some of that musician's like life is transferred into you every time you listen to it.

53:44And I just don't feel the same way about photographs and video for some reason. I don't know. But I do feel like music especially is one of those things that is going to survive. It's always been a hard business to be in. But there's something about the human authorship and performance of music that I think will never be replicated by machines. I just hope that technology does not overwhelm the rareness of, you were saying, Aaron, just of doing things together. I recently am trying to learn how to needlepoint. I took a pour-over coffee class with my husband. And like, these are the moments that I'm really, really cherishing.

54:15My 20-year-old son plays the guitar like all the time. And I love that he has that. I was just visiting him at Parents Week at school. And there is, no matter the age, there's still this desire to like come together, be together, talk, sit by a fire, do something together. And I think that that will continue to be rare and special, hopefully. I think rarity is kind of subjective. And so I'd probably reframe it as personal. And I think what will not be lost is your personal connection to a thing. And just what evolves is how it was created. And so it could have been created by human. It could have been created by AI.

54:58It could have been created by both. How you respond to it and your reaction to it and your connection to it is actually the thing that is most important. I always go back to this painting that me and my husband talk about sometimes of just like the big black dot. We all know about it. Just a black dot painted with like a hundred layers of black paint. And I look at it and I was like, that's incredible. Like what an incredible feat of focus, of precision, of art, of just creating a thing that this artist felt really portrayed their emotion right now. My husband looked at it. He's like, it's a dot.

55:28It is. It's just a dot. I felt like so moved in that moment. And he felt absolutely nothing in that moment. And I think that's like actually going to continue whether or not AI is behind the creation. You could feel incredibly moved. You could not. But it's all about how you as a human are perceiving that experience. And I think that's the piece that we won't really lose too much. And I think that's where design really has a lot of influence because as designers, we are trying to kind of move people with the work that we create. I feel like it's harder to be moved now. I feel like we're so overstimulated that it is harder to be moved in a negative way when something terrible happens.

56:02It's hard to be moved in a positive way, too, when you see great art, because it's all around us in a way that's never been before. So I do worry that we've been desensitized a little bit by all of this stimuli, and we're only just getting started. We have a wonderful audience here of amazing people, and we want to hear questions from you. So we want to transition here and invite Paola and Mark back up to the stage here so we can receive some audience questions. Hi, great conversation. Thank you. I just wanted to try to tie like the beginning and end together, because Paula started out talking about Dun & Raby.

56:39One of the things that was really exciting to me as a designer when I was young was the design of ideas, and that design objects were carriers of ideas and challenging us through that. And then you just talked about Demis Asabas's idea of radical abundance. And I think there's a lot of fear right now that AI will take away designers' jobs and all these different very like trade-based questions. And I remember as a designer saying questions about how do you start a studio with just a laptop and desktop publishing software when I was starting out. My point is, do we think that we'll be able to generate and have so many more ideas because of this technology?

57:14and is there a possibility optimistically for like a return to making things about ideas when you enable so many more people to have design ideas and make the things that they want to see so I guess I'm just curious for the panel's perspective on that I think there's a lot of possibility to design ideas and I was agreeing with Aaron when he was asking what designers should study and then he kind of answered because he was like itching to say philosophy ethics I I kind of do believe that because as there was also the question about the radical abundance and not to be a downer, but I was thinking what's rare is still justice.

57:50And it's like for some people, it's food. And I'm so sorry, you know, I really don't want to be that person. But I think that if designers could remind themselves of what's also in the rest of the world and could sometimes do the exercise of having ideas that are far-fetched, but that could maybe give different vectors to their profession, it would be fantastic. So radical abundance, I think, will free time, I hope, for us to have big ideas that hopefully will lead us to a better place all together. That was fantastic. Thank you. So I've worked in design my whole life. And in my more recent jobs, the thing that I've noticed, I've started to think about design and creativity as a spectrum of ways of thinking.

58:40I've worked in Silicon Valley. I've worked in the agency world. I've worked in more sort of narrative stuff, and I've also worked in spatial thinking and design. So what I've noticed is that on the ends of this sort of spectrum of creativity are two very different sorts of ways of thinking. One is systematic, which is how do I make things work? And I think those of you who've worked in the Valley, you've worked with engineers who are really truly creative people. They take something that doesn't exist, and it comes out of them. but the way they think about the world is how do I make this work and then the other end of the spectrum more empathetic creative disciplines like storytelling and in some cases industrial design and interface design where the design is asking not just how to make things work but also how to make people feel something what's the sort of human interaction between those things my concern right now is that the separation of these two ways of thinking have got to such a point and the power and the resources have been sort of eaten up by the systematic thinking.

59:44And so I think there's a lot of people in the Valley right now that are making decisions about how we interact as people that are really good at making things work, but have no theory of mind. And the other end of the spectrum, we've got people that know how to make people feel, but don't have the sort of practical, more inventive. In one way to think about it is the spectrum from inventiveness to expressiveness. And my feeling right now, and this is what I'd like the reaction from the panel is that how do we get more of the empathy into the inventiveness? I think it's spot on. I think that that reached a low maybe 10 years ago.

1:00:20It's still too low. But I do think to Mark's point, once kind of Apple showed everybody how important feeling is in products, companies started to slowly, way too slowly, sort of like wake up to the idea that it's not just about how it works. It's not just about that you can turn it on and get your task done, right? And so this is sometimes referred to as like the consumerization of enterprise, you know, like enterprise software used to just be like really, really hard to use and soulless. And like, you know, now some enterprise software is much more fun to use and much more delightful. And it does make you feel better.

1:00:53You didn't mention AI in particular, but I think what you bring up is super, super important in the age of building these AI products because they're being used by so many people and there are not human eyes on every one of those interactions, right? And so a lot of things are going right and a lot of things are going wrong and we can't ignore what's going wrong. And the only way around that is to bring the user into the room. It's to bring people in to talk to them about their experiences, to invite people to give us more signals. Like if you thumbs down something on Copilot and you submit your report and allow us to look through your conversation, we'll look through your conversation, see where it went wrong, fix the model so that it's better in the future.

1:01:31like that feedback loop of always not assuming success, I think is a really important thing. Like we've used over the last, I would say 30 years as we built for the internet, we've used these really, really crude ways of measuring success, right? At the beginning of our careers, it was just like server hits. How many hits did you get? Right. And that was success. And then it became like engagement, you know, and retention. And like now we have much more sophisticated ways of measuring if we did a good job or not, especially if you're using an AI companion like Copilot, like ChatGPT, like Claude, the fact that you were on it for an hour doesn't mean it was successful, nor was the fact that you were on it for only one turn mean that it was successful.

1:02:10Sometimes a successful session lasts 10 seconds. Sometimes it lasts an hour. The only way that we can know if we were actually successful in helping you through your life was to know if we accomplished that actual task for you. And that requires like really, really deep inspection into what's going on. So that work is going on right now. We need to get better at it, but it's a recognized opportunity for sure. Thank you so much. I have a question about this idea of time that comes across in AI. Everything feels like it's been very much optimized right now and that timelines have really kind of like condensed and collapsed to like a day, a week.

1:02:48And in design, the process is so essential to the outcome and iterating and being really present in that process. And I really wonder from this panel here, like how are you justifying process and time to your stakeholders right now when everything is kind of like assumed to be so hyper-optimized and collapsed in time? It's hard, I think is the first point. I agree, like the creative process, especially one that is intended to be expressive of how you feel, how you want other people to feel. It's not as clinical and easy to define. And I think that's actually why AI has a harder time producing like that kind of art, because it's not a set of steps that you can repeat.

1:03:34And so I think the general approach I've been taking, we'll see if it's successful because it changes over time, is that everyone who's in this practice and trying to build is creative in their own way. Like they are building towards a creative process for something that they want to express to other people. It just so happens that on the more inventive side of things, love that framework, that it's a little bit faster and maybe a little bit more linear. And you never really want to prevent someone from being able to express their creativity as well. And so the process I generally take is like, yeah, let's build it.

1:04:05This sounds great. Let's do it. It might take me another month or two to be able to package this or like to present it or to frame it in the right mental model that I would imagine it, that I would want to see it. But let's like see where it goes. Let's take this as far as possible. I think in the age of kind of rapid iteration, you don't really want to prevent someone from being able to express themselves that way or to create. The only caveat I would block on is for safety. That's a big one where if you see something and you're like, hey, we don't know the right packaging for this and it feels unsafe or could lead us to risky territory.

1:04:38That's where I think it's really important to actually take a stand. But in the like blurred lines of how expressive you want to be, I think you have a lot more wiggle room. And I think we all need to get a little bit more comfortable releasing things a little bit more unpolished, I would say, just to see how kind of they're received. And that tight iteration loop is so fast now that you might even get an idea from external to you and that will inspire you. So it's actually a little bit easier in that sense. Yeah, I'm thinking of two conversations I recently had with founders that got their products to market very, very quickly and saw very little traction.

1:05:13They thought they were solving a problem. They designed it very quickly, got it out there, and they're coming to me and they're like, I'm ready to invest in design. Like, I will pay anything for the right designer. I know this is going to take three or four months. It's not going to take three or four weeks. So I'd like to think at the end of the day that switching costs are low and there'll be so much software out there that hopefully the good ones will stick and the junk will get kind of washed out a bit. But I'm definitely seeing, at least on the early stage front, that people do, they're very excited about getting something out very quickly.

1:05:46And they really realize that it doesn't work as well as it should. And they're asking for design to help, which is good. We just had on Jay Park, who leads design for Ford's E-Division Interfaces. And he was talking about, as designers, creative folks, we face the blank page a lot. And we struggle with that. And sometimes we walk away and let our subconscious work on our problem. But now we can have AI spit out solutions or writing or music for us. So what might we as creative folks be missing when we remove that friction? We've just turned it into editing, really, is what it is, right? We've become editors, which I think is fine, right?

1:06:22I think what Jay is pointing to is like you don't have to create things from scratch anymore. You can generate 50 different concepts really quick to talk about in an hour with your colleagues and then decide kind of which two or three or four look more promising. So I think that's just as exciting a part of the process. We've always been editors. You know, we've always wanted to be editors. We've always raised our hands saying we need more editing in this product, right? Like we need to remove features. So, you know, you asked earlier kind of like what are some of the skills that designers like should be building and moving forward?

1:06:53Like editing is definitely one of them. I would actually posit that we actually have a blank page still, but the blank page is actually bigger than ever. I was working with an engineer the other day on like a new product that we're exploring and I was like oh like how do you think it should work he's like no Megan how would you want it to work how would you imagine it should work like express to me like if this problem we're trying to solve like you just and I will build it I know I can build it in your mind how does this feel like and it just made me realize like oh wow with this new technological invention where you can spin an idea so fast your capability of expression is actually so much broader than it used to be and the ability to power is so much bigger that I almost feel like it's almost overwhelming how much you can do now.

1:07:36And it's almost a crutch that we're leaning on our existing patterns. And I do it all the time. We have so much more potential on how to express ourselves now. So I would actually say, if it ever feels like you're leaning too heavily on editing, try and totally remove yourself from that space and imagine like if there was no limitations on this thing, how would I want it to behave? And very likely it will be possible now, which is just such a great time to be alive. Totally. like who in this room has had an engineer tell them no? Everybody, right? If you work in an environment for too long where people are telling you like, yeah, we can't build that.

1:08:07Or we don't have time to build that. Or I don't know. I don't know how to build that. Or I just don't even want to build that. You stop asking. Those muscles atrophy, right? And you forget what it's like to be this early career designer who thinks they can do anything, you know? And I think we do need to get back to that a little bit. And through the magic of this technology, I think what you're saying is we can. Thank you so much. It's a great conversation. I just wanted to follow up on the question of rareness.

1:08:29Mark Wilson:It was really hitting my head when I started my career, mid-90s, I was looking for an amazing firm. And by their own description, they used to say, oh, it's really important that you don't look at other firms' works. We don't want you to be copying other people. We don't want you to look derivative of other people, right? Now, fast forward, and this is something of a coincidence. Today, by a circumstance, Dec from a competitor came to me, a deliverable that they had made to a client almost at the end of a project. And one of their designs was literally a video of a design my firm had created. That's crazy that in the, whatever, 30 years I've been working, that's now acceptable practice.

1:09:08Mark Wilson:Just literally take a video of someone else's project and be like, oh, this is what we're going to develop for you. And it makes me think about this question of rarity and the tools of AI, which are literally composites of all these other ideas put together. And are we making tools? And how can we circumvent the allure of just having the tools spit back to us existing ideas, which is, of course, what AI is doing, right? Because that's what AI is made of. It's compositing lots of other ideas. So are there either practices or mindsets or ways that we can build these tools so that we aren't just passive responsive editors to existing ideas, but rather being forced or encouraged to generate new ideas?

1:09:49Mark Wilson:One, that's completely a technological stack issue, right? I would say that as a journalist, right? That's 100 % how LLMs and other technologies are designed, that they are finding correlations and auto-completing ideas based upon previous ideas and probabilities. So that's why we keep getting Jurassic Park 2, 3, 4 out of chat GPT when we ask questions. But Jake, what your question makes you think of is another thing that hasn't come up today in this conversation, which is our insecurity about what happens when it does. What happens when these tools actually do everything we believe they can do when we solve all of the problems?

1:10:24This can also be packaged as, will AI ever create a better song than I can?

1:10:29Mark Wilson:Right? Will AI ever write a better article than I can? And I think we absolutely have human bias. I think that the answer is absolutely yes. Eventually, right? That's the end state of all of this. And then what is meaning within that world? And I think the meaning within that world is the act of creation again. And just that we enjoy doing it. And that's sort of the ultimate payoff. And my just last thought about this is we are just so incredibly biased about human creativity, even within our own world. Look at how we compare humans to animals as if we are the only cognitive species on Earth. When in fact, like, plants are cognitive.

1:11:05Mark Wilson:I feel like we can kind of get in a trap sometimes where we distance ourselves from these AI tools or that we believe that they won't potentially do things better and meaning is actually in us doing it in the first place. Well, first of all, I want to say Megan, Kate, Mike, Mark, Paola, thank you so much for being here. Let's give them a round of applause.

1:11:3030 years of design have brought us to a place of uncertainty. where culture shifts beneath our feet, where work reinvents itself daily, where the very meaning of the human experience hangs in the balance. The ground is moving and it terrifies us and it probably should. But in this moment of profound uncertainty lies the opportunity to shape what comes next. Design's never been about making things beautiful. It's always been about making things right and making experiences that connect us and our capabilities and bring a human touch technology. The future isn't happening to us. We are happening to the future.

1:12:09Let's ensure that when the next 30 years of design history is written, it tells the story of how we chose wisdom over convenience, connection over efficiency, humanity over everything else. Thank you again to our guests, Paola, Mark, Kate, Megan, and Mike. And thank you to Word & Co. for bringing us together, for making design better these past 30 years, and for helping to establish design leaders who will help us thrive in this next era of design. That's all of you. Thank you to Automatic for hosting us. The conversation continues over at designbetter.com where you can subscribe, become a premium member to get access to our library of books, our toolkit, and more.

1:12:51Thank you, one and all. Until next time.

1:13:05This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.