Kemp Atwood on Design as a System for Value

0:00From the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, this is the Design Thinkers podcast. Design Thinkers is Canada's largest graphic design conference. Since the year 2000, the RDD has been bringing together visionaries from a range of disciplines to explore creativity and the design process. Join our host and RDD president, Nicola Hamilton, as she sits down for casual and candid conversations with Design Thinkers speakers, both past and present. This week on the Design Thinkers podcast, I'm joined by Kemp Atwood, partner at Area 17. With a background in creative writing and new media design, Kemp has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of design, strategy, and technology.

0:46He's helped shape Area 17's global vision, leading interdisciplinary teams across Paris and New York to deliver transformative work for clients like the New York Times, Google, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Canada. In this episode, we dive into how design is more than just craft, how it becomes a system for delivering real value. Kemp shares his thoughts on behavioral branding, the rise of hyper-personalized UI, what AI tools get right and wrong, and why making is still one of the best ways to think. We also talk about long-term client relationships, running a distributed global team, and how 100 plus office plants became part of the Area 17 ecosystem.

1:32Whether you're deep in digital design or simply curious about how strategy, brand, and interface collide, this one's packed with thoughtful ideas, a few laughs, and a whole lot of wisdom. Let's dive in. Hello. How's it going? Let's dive in. I'm glad we get a chance to do this, and I'm glad that we get to hang out at Design Thinkers in the fall. That'll be fun. Yes, it's going to be great. We're excited to have you. Excited to be back. Yeah, when was the last time you were in Toronto? I've been back in Toronto a bit, fairly recently, within the last year, a few times. But yeah, Design Thinkers was, what, 2018, last time I was at the conference.

2:08Yeah, I have that talk title here somewhere, which was all about storytelling. It was about storytelling, and it was really about how interface is, user interface is component of storytelling where you know I think we tend to think about you know narrative like exposition as story but really it was about how you know the user interacting with a website with an app is a big part of the story that they're creating with you and with your brand and your company so it was it was storytelling as a as a as an engagement versus a narrative as it were Yeah. Well, let's roll that back. Let's sort of stick on this storytelling thing for a second.

2:51But you actually have, your undergrad was a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and Literature from York. And then you went on to do a post-diploma certificate in new media design from the Bell Center for Creative Communications in Toronto. And you've said, I've heard you say in the past that you went into literature just because you loved stories. You loved stories generally. Why study new media after that? So I guess during when I was in school at York, as you mentioned, in Toronto, I was also getting kind of interested in design just through, you know, it was kind of the advent of the web in many ways, you know, the more popularization of people getting online and things like that.

3:36And so there was this whole new kind of world opening up that was obviously very different from the kind of storytelling that I went into school to study. I was, you know, avid reader, very deep into literature and thought that maybe I would at one point be, you know, writing stories and poems and or being a teacher in a university. But this new kind of world that I entered and started to play with just really fascinated me. And I'd always, always, always been interested in the visual nature of things. I mean, even to the point where some of my love of literature was love of books, the object, the covers, you know, and that kind of thing.

4:20So I think what drew me in was this capacity to bring words and images together and to create a space that people could interact with in some way. And not necessarily in the way of a choose-your-own-adventure story, but just in the way of having some license to go forward, go backward, and to find your way through it. Yeah, it's funny. Sort of engaging with the internet is almost like engaging with your audience in real time, especially now that we have all this like data collection where we can actually see how people move through the worlds that we're creating. Yeah, one of the I mean, this probably was I introduced this in the talk in 2018, but it's just been a foundational component of our firm since the beginning, which is that actions speak louder than words.

5:12And so that means that the Internet or, you know, in our case, really this integration of brand experience and technology, them all coming together into a point of interaction between a company or, you know, an organization and a customer or a user is actually the point where the brand comes to life, where, you know, we call this behavioral branding. but it's really where you get the proof is in the pudding, as it were. It's where your brand really shows up, whether or not it's what you wrote in your manifesto or not. That's where it really comes to fruition. Yeah, it's funny having all of that extra information, like being able to actually see the actions feels like a good thing most of the time.

5:56And every once in a while, I wonder what we're missing because we're only focused on the info we can see. How do you mean? I think I think about how little we knew in the past, right? I think about the physical objects that we're creating and selling and putting into the market. And I think about how little we used to know about what happened to those objects when they actually entered someone else's life orbit, when they went on to sort of fulfill the promise, the purpose of that thing. And how little we knew until we started asking questions. Yeah, I mean, it is very interesting. I mean, I think back to, you know, I think one of the things that got me interested in design is really modernism.

6:41You know, I was super interested in chair design for some reason. I mean, I guess as designers, that's, you know, somehow the holy grail. I don't know why. I worked, I interned at the design exchange in Toronto when I was going to school. and they, I mean, they have, or had at least, a pretty big archive of chairs. And I did a little project, you know, in my studies on some chair designers and kind of the top 10 designs of Canadian chairs. And I think that there's something about that time, the Bauhaus, you know, the shift to function, where there was, you know, So while we didn't maybe, you know, have the data of how things were being used in people's lives, you know, post sale, et cetera, there was this real shift to the purpose and intention of what those products were, how they were going to live.

7:40And so I think it was kind of the advent in some ways of, you know, user research and kind of putting the user at the center of what the actual product and its life, you know, in someone's experience is going to be. Yeah. Yes. I just think about how lovely it was that at one point we actually had to go and ask those people. And in some processes we do still go and ask those people versus just having access to that info. No, that's exactly right. And I think that, you know, I think that's really interesting. I mean, so we go directly to users and customers as much as we can. And I think that we don't always get that opportunity, partly because of budgets, partly because...

8:20Haste. Haste, yeah, exactly. The modern world. And I think what's interesting is it's getting, in the way that you're positioning it, it's getting worse, while it can also get better. in the sense that like, you know, I know that there are organizations who create, you know, UI or AI personas and they query the AI personas. So they're creating, you know, like you said, it's not just using the data now, it's using the data to create almost a, the perception that we're actually asking direct people, how it's going to live in their life, what they want, you know, what their needs are, et cetera. So it's almost an additional layer of abstraction.

8:59Well, let's hang out there for a second. So Area 17 just published their summer 2025 AI report, and I noticed that you're listed as an advisor. So how involved are you in some of those discussions that are happening in and around the agency? I'm very involved in the discussions. That report specifically came out of a couple of different things within the organization. So in 2019, OpenAI came to us for sort of the relaunch of their website. Really, the purpose there was to introduce them to the general public for the first time. I mean, and in concert with that, it was really introducing AI to the world.

9:45I mean, you know, it was I look back and I think, oh, my goodness, like, you know, when it first came in, we weren't doing any of the things we're doing today. We weren't thinking in the way that we're thinking today. We didn't see the possibilities that we see today. And maybe that was short sighted in this, but it was also just a lack of exposure. So I think, you know, so that really started us on a journey, obviously getting sort of this, you know, this early stage kind of understanding of both the risks and the opportunities of AI that then, you know, you get the kind of work you do. And so the success of that brought in other AI organizations for branding and for communications and marketing and some product design and helping introduce them into the world.

10:34So through this kind of exposure and having, you know, each one, and oftentimes they had a branding component, thinking about what is this organization, how do they need to show up in a visual way, and how does that tie to their purpose and mission? So we did a lot of that work. One of our UX leads in Paris, Ibato, has a background in semiotics, and she did a sort of semiotic research on not just the work we were doing, but the much wider landscape. And she kind of came up with these areas. And that was kind of the basis of then further research. George did a talk in Spain, our CEO and founder did a talk in Spain and kind of bringing these together and tying it with these cultural touch points.

11:28And I was there with him when he gave that talk. And so it's yeah. So my involvement is, you know, in the work in some ways and being part of each draft as it comes through and thinking through how we want to present this to the world. But there was a, as I'm sure you saw in the report, there was a pretty strong team all together putting that out into the world. I think that there are also lots of other thinking that we're doing on AI that isn't encapsulated in that report that, you know, that we're thinking a lot about. Yeah, I mean, I think even the publishing of that report, right, asking the team to sort of get together and think about it.

12:05I mean, we're in this moment of such massive change that transparency and discussion are kind of the only way forward, right? To be able to have those conversations internally and then present it externally. You know, I think our partners need to understand the capabilities and limitations of that technology, too. Absolutely. And I think, I mean, it's just been really great for us to bring that thinking into one cohesive package, as it were. We've gotten really good responses to it. It's beautiful visually. And I think it resonates, you know. But yes, exactly to your point. I think having that transparency, what are you thinking about, you know, just exposing as much information as possible, I think is really important right now because there are no answers.

12:52And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit as we think about what the future looks like. When you sort of think about it in the design context, like what are sort of the things you're thinking about AI in that sort of graphic generation context? So I will say I don't think about it too much in the graphic generation context. I mean, I know and we've experimented with some of the sort of generative AI angles and, you know, we played with some of the early, you know, the early adoption tools like Adobe. I can't remember what Adobe ended up calling their AI exposure. Firefly at the beginning?

13:31So Firefly at the beginning, but they have a product in beta, which I think was called Concept at the beginning that we played around with, which is more about, I think they've released it in beta, but I can't remember the name of it. But it's more about how does AI help you hone and create a concept, which I think is really interesting. So it's generative AI, but it's generative AI in a sort of more conceptual environment, sort of that early stage reference gathering and thinking, which I think is really interesting and cool, which I think is maybe as it relates to generative AI, more interesting.

14:11What I think is, so what we're thinking about a lot is what the future looks like, you know, one or two steps removed and who knows how fast it's going to come, but generative UI. So, you know, I think that the future is almost certainly going to be very personalized UI experiences through whether it's, you know, through a more general AI and LLM of some version or, you know, branded spaces, travel app, an airline, you know, what have you. and we're going to be moving away from this sort of designing of a single interface, going back to our comment about user research and whatnot, instead of designing a single interface based on what we can learn or ask about a general group of people and then designing a single interface that prioritizes who we heard the greatest needs from and takes these user groups and says, okay, well, this is the best version of this product based on what we know, we think.

15:23It's going to be much, much more personalized. It's actually going to be, well, this person has made these choices in the past. This is how they've interacted. And because of that, we're going to, on the fly, generate a UI that is hyper-specific to them. And that is, I think, you know, that's something that we're thinking about because, you know, there's a lot of talk about the end of websites, the end of screens and and what's the future look like? I mean, you're talking to somebody who's heavily invested in print media and, you know, print has died the slowest death known to man. If it's dying for 50 years, we've been talking about the death of print and actually it's seeing a resurgence.

16:08so it'll change it's funny though you talking about those sort of customized um uis had me thinking about like really early versions of the internet like um that were modular that you sort of moved all the pieces around yourself it had me thinking about early facebook early myspace totally where you had the control and i mean we've seen you know we've done so many websites and products that have, you know, the client might have come in saying, you know, let's say a museum website, we want the user to be able to customize A, B, C, and D. We want them to be able to create their own journey. We want them to create their own tour.

16:46And the adoption on those kinds of things is not high, let's say, in a general sense. You know, going back to the creating your MySpace or, you know, customizing your own profile and doing all these different things. But I think it is quite interesting to think about that happening based on your interactions and that it's super hyper personalized, but that you can then override. And, you know, so, oh, that's how, that's what showed up because of this, I didn't think, but I'm going to override that and I'm going to tweak. And it's sort of the, um, the human in the system as it were versus having to do it all yourself.

17:25So I think there's something very interesting in that, you know, so you mentioned the end of print. And that's, that's something I've been thinking about a lot, especially as it relates to the sort of end of websites or end of screens. You know, I think I had, I actually had a client a few days ago who said to me like, yeah, but I mean, I mean, websites, like, do we need them anymore? You know, and, and that's a big part of our business. You know, we, we, in terms of, in terms of our output, if you look at our output, you know, there's, we, we make a lot of websites, build a lot of websites. Granted, we are also doing brand and strategy and I'll get to that in a second.

18:03But so I think when we think about, you know, will the website exist in the future, which I think a lot of people are asking and saying, it's very similar to, you know, that and that end of print narrative was, you know, that moment that we were talking about in my origin um you know the Carson's End of Print was one of the books I referenced back then you know that the internet was gonna you know be the death knell for for publications um and as you said they and that would have been the mid-90s that was the mid-90s yeah yeah where actually the the sort of narrative around death of print popped into sort of pop culture um in the mid-80s talking about television.

18:49Like why? Got it. Yeah. So that's another, right. Going back a whole other step. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. The first time it was in pop culture was actually in the original Ghostbusters. Wow. I didn't know that. That's so interesting. I'm going to, I'm going to incorporate that because I am building a bit of a narrative around this and I need to do more research. So it's, it's very nascent and superficial at the moment, but it is making a correlation between sort of this end of website, you know, or end of screen with the end of print. And of course, as you mentioned, the specialization that has then occurred because of, you know, because of the changes.

19:30So what is that specialization in the future? What is the difference? Yeah. Or how do you break through the noise when everyone's doing one thing? You know, I think, and just to, just to tease that narrative out a little bit, You know, there was, and I think editorial is a big part of it and shopping and information is a big part of the narrative. But there was a time, you know, when RSS readers came out and Apple News and Facebook News that, you know, a lot of the publications were, okay, well, that's the end of our website presence. We don't have control over the data or we don't have control over our brand in these spaces.

20:10And so that the RSS readers were kind of this early stage, like, oh, our websites are going to go away. Everything is going to be aggregated. And then when Google created these clips, you know, where you can kind of get all the information that you're searching for, whether it's a movie or, you know, shopping, it just all appears in their own branded space and not yours. There was also the fear that, OK, well, IMDB, for example, doesn't need to exist because all the information is in Google. And that's the death. And so I think there are these sort of iterations of of how technology is is both, you know, consumed and distributed.

20:52And the new world order is yet to be determined. But I don't think it's the end of websites or the end of screens. But what is that future thing is quite interesting to think about. Even thinking about the news website, I mean, we've made a full pivot backwards, right? We've done a full 180 on that in that most people are actually going to web homepages now because what's being pulled into social media feels less trustworthy. Exactly. And I think that's what's very interesting about that is that it's about brand. And so I think it gets back to this, you know, actions speak louder than words of that interaction that you have with whatever, you know, news source that you choose to kind of go directly to, you have a reason to trust that more than somewhere else.

21:44And I think that's really interesting. Yeah. And I mean, when we were talking about not news outlets so much or trustworthiness, when you're talking about more consumer products, the sort of community piece has continued to be the belonging or the sort of personal association with a brand has continued to get more and more important. Exactly. Okay. So, I mean, this is all sort of tied in to my next question, but you're sort of leading both global design and strategy at Area 17. And I'm sort of curious, like what it's like to actually lead both of those teams to be sort of in communication with both of those teams all the time.

22:18Do you feel like you're sort of putting your strategy hat on sometimes and your design hat on other times? Is it all weave together? Yeah, I mean, my role has evolved a little bit over the last six years, I would say, where I don't necessarily just lead or lead the design and strategy teams as a kind of singular leader, as it were. So our structure is we have three partners, myself, Georgie, who's the founder, and Hannah Christworth, who's the chief operating officer. And we kind of look at the whole business through, you know, lenses of craft impact and so all. And so as a three person kind of team leadership, we're looking at the entire business through the lenses of craft impact and so all.

23:11And then we have at each in each studio, we have managing directors who who lead the day to day, who who lead CREP, Impact and Soul, as it were, at the local level. And so meaning that they're leading their local team. So my role is kind of threefold. One, it's kind of early stage partnerships and business development, thought leadership, relationship building, and then also working with the managing directors and the group directors and kind of the local teams on how we present ourselves and think about the conversion kind of journey, as it were. And the second part really is being principal on projects.

24:00And so as a principal on a project, I'm really involved in that early stage strategic thinking, being brought in to look at the designs and kind of being more on that sort of consultant level to a project and client team as it relates to strategy and design, most specifically, but also as technology. gets integrated into that. And the third is really looking at our overarching methods and practices for how we deliver value. So how can we be more effective at delivering value? How can we be more efficient in order to deliver more value? It's all focused on how we can identify and create more value for our partnerships.

24:47But that's where I'm really kind of across all of the disciplines, helping the teams calibrate and create methods that help us be more effective overall. Yeah. So how much are you getting your hands dirty? Do you get to make anything? So the thing, I don't make a lot of tangible outputs, certainly not for clients, but I make things as it relates to methodology. So I'm, you know, I'm constantly kind of drawing and thinking about how the different systems kind of come together to create ways of working and ways of thinking that help us be more effective and more valuable. And lately, I'm doing, I'm making, I try to make something every week for the last little while as it relates to just AI experiments.

25:41And how can I, you know, make a little gem or how can I make a custom GPT that just does something that is useful that we need right now. And that's been a lot of fun, actually. Yeah, yeah. Can you tell us more about that, about those experiments? Taking a little break here to remind you that this podcast is an extension of the Design Thinkers Conference. That's Canada's largest annual design conference hosted by the Association of Registered Graphic Designers. Since the late 2000s, the RGD has been recording Design Thinkers presentations and making them available to all of our members. There are over 400 Design Thinkers presentations available in the archive.

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27:11Sure. So, I mean, you know, I think what I found very interesting relatively recently is just understanding that AI is pretty dumb when it comes to you and how you work and what you want to get out of it. but it has unbelievable amounts of knowledge. Someone recently kind of made the analogy that it's like you have someone with a PhD in everything, but it's their first day on the job. And so it's kind of like, and what that means is that if you can embed your point of view and your perspective and what it is you're trying to get into AI and into these little projects and experiments, you're going to get a much better result.

28:06So, you know, one of the experiments was super, super simple. Simply, we are, you know, as an organization, you know, really reinforcing our transformation to value and trying at every stage of our communication, both internally and externally to be translating our language of outputs, we do, we make, we are, to the value that's left behind, the outcome. And so sometimes it's difficult to write language in outcomes. It's difficult to think about, okay, well, this is what's left. This is the value when you're talking about it. So this little gem that I wrote was very simple, just giving the instructions of how we understand an outcome versus an output.

29:00And you can feed it in and it gives you direction and it says, you know, here's what I would suggest you write. And here's why this is an output, not an outcome. And so it's very simple, very small. Other experiments are just in terms of how much data can we put in and what kind of queries can we get out of that? So imagine, you know, account dashboards and things like that. how can these be helpful and functional? How can we improve our onboarding through these kind of data hubs, as it were, that are empowered with AI? And a few other, yeah, lots of other little things. It makes me think a little bit about like some of the sort of more generative AI experiments that writers and artists are doing where they have more ownership over the inputs, Right.

29:48Like where it's not like a public input. It hasn't scraped the Internet. They've actually chosen to input their own work into it and how they can get something out to the other side that's more useful to them. Exactly. Exactly. Homogenous space. Exactly. It's not just this open space, you know, it's really you're putting parameters around it. And I think, you know, coming back to that, coming back to the sort of generative UI future that, you know, many predict, what, you know, and also tying in what you were saying about the return to editorial homepages, let's say, and the brand sort of trust that has been established there.