How is designed changing as a discipline and profession and
how do we face these challenges and opportunities as a
community? We explore these questions and
more on design feature now from aiga the professional
association for design. I'm Li Shan Wang in this
episode. We talk Cowboys Indians
assumptions tension and more with our guest designer
filmmaker and author Jack Roberts.
Hijack. Thanks so much for coming on the
show. You wrote a recent book called
Echo. Designs her way out of a paper
bag and in the book you share an anecdote from your childhood and
you describe yourself as a little bit Cowboy a little bit
Indian. Can you tell us more about that
in terms of your identity as a person and as a professional and
how these melt together absolutely thank you for having
me. I am a little bit cowboy and a
little bit India. I'm I'm both Cherokee Native
American and also grew up in the wild west of, Oklahoma.
Ah place not many people venture out of to places like New York
or Los Angeles or Paris where I spend most of my time.
So I find that growing up in the land of what I would call The
Land of Stories a hundred and eleven tribes pushed into an
Indian Territory you grew up with nothing, but myth and so
finding a way to kind of kind of a symbol that into a worldview
was quite a unique opportunity. So let's talk about stories and
myth because your book Echo designs are way out of Paper
bag. It's a mix of a business book.
There's fiction. There's nonfiction.
There is story telling you we've all of these things together in
pretty seamless interesting way, but it definitely breaks some of
these rules and boundaries of typical business writing.
So why why do we need to mix fact and myth and design
thinking and storytelling or that's a great question.
I think ultimately the illusion is that we're not mixing them
already our Facts are only facts until we disprove them which
happens constantly, especially if you live in that sort of
design thinking iterative mindset where you're constantly
challenging assumption and I think that's what I wanted to do
with business books in general. I feel like they purpose to
deliver a lot of value and that's really their proposition
to the world. But so much of value isn't just
in what we say, but it's really in how we say it and I don't
find business books particularly creative in the how they say it
and I really approached it in a way of how might I really share
something unique and generative and valuable for people in
business and design in everyday life that has the same kind of
Truth a business book would but is also delivered in a way
that's entertaining because honestly, we as authors are no
longer competing with other books or other business voices
even were competing with Scrolling Netflix for 45 minutes
to decide what we're going to watch.
Can you give us some of these story beats in your own
professional life? Like how how designed weaves
into all of these things? How do you came to design how
you are integrating design and storytelling in what you do
absolutely design for me is a way of being I would almost
characterize it as a religion in that way.
I think that the idea of religion is it's an organization
of beliefs that guide. The principles of how we
approach the world and for me design has a little bit always
been that how can I design the best story to tell in the moment
and I've really always approached storytelling from a
design perspective growing up in the Cherokee Nation the way that
I did moving around as much as I did and Reinventing myself
constantly. I started to notice these
patterns and really to me design is ultimately about finding the
insides of patterning and clustering and pulling those out
and weaving them together into something that's meaningful.
It's really about meaning making and storytelling is essentially
the same thing. It's the vehicle that allows us
to make meaning because it connects with us on a human
level and design is really moving in the last several
decades towards a very human centered approach.
And so I found these two to fit rather seamlessly for me in
regards to how I Came Upon design.
It was in constantly moving as a child.
I think I Was in 37 different houses by the time I was 18 and
every time my mother would want to reinvent the house and so we
would redecorate and every time she got stressed she'd rearrange
things and I think I picked that up.
And so I found myself designing for stress relief and
ultimately, you know, I have a queue of over a hundred
websites. I've designed that I'll never do
anything with simply because it's my stress relief and I
think that the stories that I tell ultimately have a real
design. In through like so you tell the
story in your book. There's this theme of not your
first rodeo and it sounds like you've had multiple rodeos of
just moving house as well and redesigning those experiences
and those spaces for comfort and distress.
How do you encourage this idea of Master?
It may be folks who didn't grow up with the same environment of
having to redesign their situation all the time and
building creative confidence as designers as storytellers.
How can people do that? That's Wonderful question.
How can people practice the principles of constant change is
really what you're asking in a way and I think we're in
constant change. And the first thing we have to
address is the fact that we're usually terrified of it.
So I think so ultimately encountering that with that
creative confidence is the thing to do but it's that strange sort
of double edged sword because when you practice creative
confidence, you may not have creative confidence quite yet.
And so You almost have to practice in order to gain
creative confidence, but you didn't the creative confidence
to even start to practice. And I find that the way anyone
can start is simply by acknowledging something.
They want to change and I would encourage anyone to look at the
millions of resources that are out there at this point, maybe
not Millions, but certainly tens of thousands of methodologies
around design and redesign and what those processes are the
processes of design thinking my book tour.
It's about one of them called narrative design which is sort
of a fusion of design thinking and storytelling principles.
And so the idea is that the you have these processes that you
can take any situation through and change it you can redesign
it. I think ultimately it goes back
to what we talked about a moment ago in the space of assumption.
I think many of us make assumptions that that's
something someone else does or they've had a lot of practice at
it or they're ultimately more gifted than I am.
I am and it's just simply not true.
I think on some level were unwilling to see the life were
living as immediately transferable to the life.
We'd love to live. So in some ways, it sounds like
you're defining design in your experience of having to
redecorate a redesign your living space because of all of
these moves. It's almost a way of reclaiming
your story write in terms of your identity of who you are and
having to constantly redesign who you are whether it was
growing up in the environment. You did but also more recently
as a professional having just completed his Master's program
here at Parsons. Now you're teaching at Parsons.
So can you tell me more about this idea of like reclaiming
your story and identity is almost kind of Designing
yourself, right? Yes.
It is. It's absolutely designing
yourself. And I think that's very astute.
In fact, I'm having a realization in this moment
because of your question that I likely pursued acting for so
long because of the reinvention of self and when you design a
character you you implement actual Sign you use user
research. You study your characters you
come with character breakdowns which are context and then you
begin to build out a Persona and create an entire sort of user
Journey. So so many of these tools that
we use in design and design thinking are actually being used
elsewhere to we just call them different things.
And I think that's the thing that's really been surprising to
me is that all of my worlds have sort of converged in this space
of design thinking and so many of the things I had already been
doing in film. Television writing and acting
and even novels all of these things required the same process
and that process is essentially the reinvention of yourself, and
I know that that sounds a bit esoteric and it sounds a little
bit, you know psychology driven but little self-help a little
self helpy. Yes, absolutely.
But if we can't design our own lives, what are we doing here?
Ultimately everything you're trying to accomplish through
your design principles is Thing that benefits or affects your
life, why not go straight to the root and change who you are and
actually become the thing and the person that achieves the
thing you want to see happen. So for folks who see design
maybe or their background in design is different.
Maybe it's more focused on the visual or the artifact something
that's more tangible and maybe less self-reflexive in that way.
It could be a little bit uncomfortable to think about
design in the self. Helpy kind of way.
Do you have any advice for folks like that?
Come from a traditional design background and getting them more
confident or just convincing them that design is also this
bigger thing about reclaiming your story and designing
yourself. Absolutely.
I think ultimately I would say that the designs that they
already know the way they designed their way of being so
to speak as a designer that they already use day-to-day to create
those artifacts to create products to create Services.
All of these things hold the same key.
He's that it would take to shift their life and any Direction
they wanted to take it. I think the thing that was
fascinating to me was this idea of sort of reframing or
redesigning your story because fundamentally is story is
essentially a collection of beliefs that we've aligned
ourselves with somehow. This is true.
And if you think about story in the bigger sense and you take
away these sort of pedantic use of Storytelling as marketing or
branding and you think about it as sort of a little more ancient
something we've always He's done to kind of bring each other
together around a fire or in the time of Crisis or trouble.
You know, the stories are the things that can unite us there.
Also, the things that divide us so in my opinion designers have
a really unique position because they understand the how of
something and we're in an age of information which is fallen out
of the Industrial Revolution, which was really an age of what
we're about what we're doing expansion growth.
And then we move into this space of information and it's
exponential each day. We're getting barraged with so
much information and we don't know how to make sense of It
ultimately designers though have the unique ability of how they
understand a thing. They have ways and methods to
understand a thing and to make sense of it.
We're poised in this place if we choose to be to actually lead
things to Unity rather than division through design.
And through design methodologies what we're essentially afraid of
I think is our own power. That's what I would say.
That's really interesting. You've said so many interesting
things that I'd love to pick on multiple threads right now.
The power 1 is something I'd love to come back to as well as
the use of fiction and myth and go deeper there.
But first I just want to reflect a little bit on this idea of
shared story and identity among designers because I think one of
the I don't want to say Isis that sounds too alarmist, but
one of the issues facing design as a profession right now, I
think comes from this breakdown of the shared story because
there's no longer one dominant story of shared struggle, right?
If you think about design from a few decades ago people were
coming into the field in Fairly homogeneous ways in terms of you
starting out as an apprentice or you going to an art school
design school working your way up to art director creative
director. Maybe you get a say in terms of
strategy and management and Days, there's folks coming in to
design through these hybrid programs like ours at Parsons in
strategic design and management. You have folks with mbas who are
calling themselves designers and that sort of shared identity and
that shared struggle is going away.
Do you have any thoughts about that in terms of just designers
identity because it's both a field that's more open than ever
before but also because of that openness is fragmented in terms
of the stories that we tell in the shared identities that we
might have you bet. I think we are in a and You use
the word crisis and I would say it's an identity crisis.
I also don't want to sound alarmist, but we are in an
identity crisis. We're in a space where websites
can be built in, you know, an hour by a teenager who has zero
practice and zero design education that person will see
themselves as a designer that will be their narrative.
They may create logos or graphics for their friends.
They may have an app that allows To change a sneaker that they
love and I see this in my students at Parsons as well.
They come in already seen themselves as designers to a
design school. So it's really an identity
crisis in a lot of ways we had this shared space this shared
struggle to Shared identity of designers against the world.
So to speak and struggling for their say at the table and
really working very hard for it, but it's not that different than
so many other social movements in a lot of ways and we find
ourselves at this. Crossroads in a lot of areas, I
think in each of those struggles.
I see a pattern myself and I see an inability of the generation
that's come before to lead and not an inability but really an
unwillingness and it's sad to me because they hold the keys and
the knowledge to actually bring people into the fold at you
mentioned the concept of apprenticeship earlier and I
wonder sometimes if the generations that came before us
rather than struggling to hang on to their power and their
influence. And trying to not change in the
face of this overwhelming change.
That's a foot. What if they decided to get on
top of the wave and actually lead it what if they decided to
open the doors and say yes, come on in be a designer.
Let me show you how that's done. You know, it's interesting
because part of this decline of the apprenticeship system,
perhaps also comes from the Boom in design jobs, right,
especially in the tech industry where there's just so many
designers that needs to be higher that we now have, you
know, the general Assemblies of the the world these kind of boot
camps that have the promise of turning somebody into a designer
or technologists and in 12 weeks or 14 weeks, whatever that is,
right and how that changes the shared narrative which is
different from folks who were working a way kind of doing this
log at an apprenticeship for three four five years before
they were allowed to really have more agency and for me I got
into design through art school, right?
I've studied at NYU in an art and Technology Program.
Really working with digital media emergent media and then
design is one of the ways to pay off your NYU loans and so for me
it was kind of from there. But now we also have this
narrative around trying to divorce designed from art and
and just Aesthetics right in thinking about design is problem
solving and that creates another crisis because plenty of other
people can solve problems right like Engineers are problem
solvers managers are problem solvers like it doesn't make
designers special per se Say yeah, do you have any thoughts
about that? I do think it's a great
threatened and interesting set of questions.
I will say that one of the most fascinating movements to me came
through a body of research over the last 30 years and is
epitomized in a book called The Design way in it.
It's posited essentially that at the Advent of Western
Civilization. We had we had this division of
knowledge and one was the Arts and Humanities the other was
science and math and Engineering would have fallen into that
category the third they didn't quite know how to quantify was
this thing that bled in the sort of every area and it was it was
sort of design you think about ancient philosophers and
mathematicians and artists and these people who didn't quite
fit into everything you think of Pythagoras the DaVinci's of the
world these people who were prolific and so many different
mediums in so many different ways and that's because they
understood the how of a thing and they were ability their Leti
to transfer that knowledge through mediums was nothing
short of Staggering and I would ask I would ask this question to
your question and some ways. Where is that gone?
And where is that ability to I would say design anything with
the same sort of methodology and abilities that designed one
thing moving into another industry and innovating there as
well. I don't see a lot of that
happening. In fact in some ways it were on
an uptick of that move and I would say we're headed towards a
Renaissance in some ways personally, but it's going to
take the designer to leave the Smithy and to stop seeing
themselves as a Craftsman alone. That's what I mean by that
leadership space that we're sort of unwilling to take ownership
of our own abilities and we use it and some of the best
designers in the world have done products for both apple and also
made dish Washers, you know, how does one person solve problems
in all of those spaces? Well, there's clearly some kind
of thinking behind it. And so now we have the emergence
of design thinking but the story were telling about it I think is
a little bit disjointed in a little bit miserable.
So was there a moment for you and your own life and career
where you had this realization that you were more than just a
Craftsman and artisan and you were leader and and to use your
own phrase to you were able to step into your own power.
Yes. I think ultimately it came
through feature film and producing writing and acting in
a feature film that I made and the film did very very well
played 21 festivals around the world at 111 of them was picked
up by Warner Brothers went on to a limited theatrical release
etcetera Etc. What was unique about that is I
had the opportunity to move from artists to designer because when
I started that project and before I sat across from Ders to
raise money and asked for you know, millions of dollars from
people. I went in with these artistic
sensibilities. The story has to be this it's
going to feel like this and it has to express these things and
that's really what my art is about and it's going to be like
these projects but better And then you look across from
someone who cares nothing about any of those things and they're
holding the key in their checkbook to your dreams, right
and how will it focus group rent and how will it focus group and
who's your target audience and I'm like the people who love my
art and and they're like, yes and beyond your self-expression.
How will I make my money back and like that's just it my self
expression will make your money back and they don't believe you
so it changes your mindset slowly and you have to go Okay.
Well who is my user? What is their Journey?
They have a hundred films a day. They could choose from why mine
what's differentiated? What's the story?
I'm telling about this story. Let's say I make the film but
now how am I going to take it to Market?
What's the story about the story?
How do I design all of this to create an experience for my user
that actually makes them say I love this film everything about
this film. And so then I both get to
express what I want to do and they get what they want.
I think there's a quote by Jim Rohn who I think is interesting
because he was one of these early sort of self-help
motivator guys in the 60s and 70s and he said give enough
people what they want and you'll get what you want and I think in
many ways that's how design is differentiated from art and art
we come into this wanting to be creative and we come in wanting
to express our Left and I think in some ways the designers of
the past that's what we have to let go of and we have to realize
that we are and have always been in our profession has often been
used at and it's been most successful when we take our
creativity and we use it in service of others and I would
say that for me that differentiation happened in that
shift happened with that first film Project when we think about
design is creating these experiences serving others.
There's a need for power. However, you define it right and
and film just by the nature of the medium requires a lot of
money. It requires a lot of teamwork
and I think we go back and forth about the filmmaker or the
designer as auteur right of you know, if we think about Johnny
Ive and his tiny red apple and they can vote or of all of those
design choices that resulted in all those Apple products.
How do we think about individual and Collective power to go back
to this theme of power, right? About both advocating for our
users, right the people our customers the people that were
serving but also advocating for ourselves in terms of that power
and grappling with this whole tension of the auteur and the
sort of great man, and it's traditionally has often been a
man. Unfortunately, right and this
whole narrative around the creative and the creative genius
versus this Collective power that we need to deal with some
of these problems that were addressing.
Being in some ways. I think the myth of the creative
genius is necessary to get those of us with the biggest ideas
going. I don't think it's sustainable
and I think history proves that point when you watch the mad
scientist at work, if they never drop the Mad Science, they end
up decimating themselves at some point along the way.
I think it's a stage of growth and some ways to those of us
that want to do big things. You have to have a big enough
ego to try something ridiculous. Just enough creative confidence.
Perhaps even unfounded to try something really unique and
original in the world because it's a vulnerable thing.
It's a very vulnerable thing to share your big ideas in your big
hopes and dreams out there either in a story or on the
screen or in a design or in a product.
It's about the biggest thing. I think we can do your naked on
display in front of everyone and that myth though that myth of
the creative genius I think is Myth because ultimately all of
those successes that came from those individuals came because
of their exchange with their audience or their users.
So I think about the quote that's attributed to Henry Ford
whether he ever said or not. I hope whoever gets credit for
it someday probably some woman back there and who was
uncredited said that if I'd given people what they wanted.
I would have found a way that create a faster.
Horse and instead he created the automobile and despite even his
friend Tom Edison at a time telling him.
It was a bad idea. And so Granite Edison had on his
shelf and electrical engine. He was working on as opposed to
the combustible. So he had plans that Henry was
just a little faster to get to and what a different world that
would have been nothing but electric cars from the beginning
but I think about things like that.
And so there is this sort of acknowledgement of this is what
people want and what he did is he did the hard work to see
through that and challenge those assumptions and say what you're
really wanting is to get from one place to another faster.
Well, how can I create that for you?
And then he started to really brainstorm those spaces and out
of that came the the tractor and then the truck and then the car
and then the assembly line and that's led to specialization
which is created the technological boom.
We're in now and the age of information and now we're in the
age of how we're designers have a very unique opportunity to use
that same kind of exchange and ability to see through what
people say they want and give them what they have no idea can
exist because Of our own creative power.
I think that is an interesting tension that's inherent than in
the power array because as you say you kind of have to be
somebody with a huge ego to think that you can do something
that will change the world and that is that it is inherently
part of the creative confidence part, but then there's also to
use another buzzword this servant leadership part where
you are doing it to benefit or to add value to the people who
are using your products and your services and and there's always
that tension there between the I am the designer versus I am
serving my users or my community grappling with that tension.
Have you thought about what success as a designer as a
creative professional looks like to you because in many measures
you already have achieved a lot of success in terms of having a
book having put out films and shows and things like that.
So in the broad sense, what does that success look like?
I think it looks like to quote Thomas Edison.
I like hard. Work and overalls and I think
ultimately a lot of continuous Improvement and in some ways
maybe you do have to have a really large ego to say I can
never be done growing, you know, because maybe you really have
like a stalemate at some point. I don't know ultimately though.
I think success for me looks a lot like continuing to explore
the world and continuing to hold those things in tension between
what people think they want and what creativity can give them
and to assemble All teams of people to continue to do those
things you use the word tension and I think it's really an apt
description of how I would Define truth.
I think truth itself is a constant tension of all the
things I am and all the things I'm not because I'm both of
those things. I'm both a person who lacks the
ability to I particularly have a weakness for gluten free donuts,
right? So I have the inability to cut
sugar out completely because Every time I randomly run into
the very few places, there's a gluten free donut.
I'm going to have one Sour Patch Kids on Long flights.
It's the same thing. I will always take Sour Patch
Kids on flights despite my Affinity for Natural Health and
every other area of my life. And I think those kinds of weird
little tensions or eccentricities that we all have
our the tensions that make us who we are.
I saw a brilliant Heineken add that years ago.
We are they brought a lot of people in blind.
They used user experience in a really fascinating way and they
brought these people in blind with people.
They knew that they previously had interviewed to disagree with
on specific topics. For instance.
They brought sort of a middle American man who was homophobic
and anti-gay and a veteran in to build a bar with a woman who is
gay part of the gay. its movement and also in the Army
and so they brought her in and him in and they built this bar
together and they didn't tell either of them anything about
each other and the ad had me in tears by the end of it because
by the end of it, they're challenging their assumptions in
the most basic and beautiful way possible because they've made
each other human-centered the really only trying to connect
with the person across from them and then they share a beer
together and then they are interviewed them afterwards and
said to George assumptions change and both of them had
completely changed in addition to being just a fantastic story
in terms of Storytelling for advertising.
I think it's a great ad for the power of design as well.
Right? So even though they have the
instructions on how to build the bar.
I think there's something there's a theory of change
there. That's like if we can get more
people diverse people designing stuff are building stuff
together in a concrete way. Maybe that's a social movement
as well because more and more of our economy feels more and more
abstracted and remove from the everyday riddance.
Not not necessarily about going back to an industrial economy,
which is getting people to design stuff and make stuff
stuff also, including experiences and things that are
more experiential or service based as well.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
I do and I think it's a great observation and I concur with
you that it is absolutely the power of design at work.
I would go back to the idea of The power the designer actually
holds in the ability to design experience if we allow our
Craftsman mentality to morph and iterate into something that is a
bit broader and a bit more leadership oriented and a little
more. Let's help guide these kinds of
interaction experiences. We understand human behavior in
a way that very few professions. Do we study it through
ethnography? We're actively inside design
research and we're in a Ecology that most people don't even know
most people don't even know what phenomenology is.
Can you unpack phenomenology for our listeners?
You bet phenomenology means the study of human experience it,
you know goes back to some movements and Germany in the
1800's people are very scared of anything that was happening in
Germany that led to some really heinous uses of design inside
camps and these these kinds of atrocities.
However, we also have within phenomenology the study of human
experience. If we just take it for what it
is the power of observation of actual hypothesis in observation
educated guesses we go in and we observe because there's a huge
disconnect between what people say they do versus what they
actually do. There's a fun exercise if you
just take a moment of brushing your teeth and you write down
everything you do when your Your teeth and then later that night
you record yourself brushing your teeth.
I think that most people would actually find and most people
would have done this exercise that I've encountered do
actually find that they're Liars.
They don't know what they do when they brush their teeth and
they think they do it for a lot longer than they do as well, you
know, and so dentists all say to brush your teeth for two minutes
minimum between two and four minutes is ideal and even the
people who Say they would do that.
I've clocked themselves at about 27 seconds.
And so that's that's very very far from 2 minutes.
And my point is when we study people in their natural habitat,
and we observe their experience as designers were able to pull
out these kinds of insights and create personas and then create
Journeys which ultimately our stories that allow us to guide
and shape future experiences like this Heineken ad for
example, that was something that was created through observing
people through Rafi through Visual ethnography the power of
documentary which is essentially a visual ethnography and then
the documentary in the information and insights from
that was created to pair two people together that Our
intention from the beginning and if we get them back to the place
how might we get them to a place of understanding and that whole
ad could have been structured around that one how might we
statement. I think this is another point
where we can draw a parallel between the how might we
statements of the design thinking process.
Process and storytelling as well you pointed out earlier that I
use this word tension and you've also been using the word
assumption trying to weave them all together to make sense of
them. I started using this word
tension to describe the setup for stories.
I borrowed it from my friend Gary Jaffe.
He's a filmmaker he came to speak about storytelling to one
of my classes and prior to his guest lecture.
I had always talked about the essence of story being conflict
but conflict in a broad sense right?
Not just like Michael Bay action movie.
Conflict but also internal conflict but I think it was kind
of throwing a lot of people off and Gary started using he
introduced me to using the word tension and that could be a
dramatic tension. It could be, you know, the
sexual tension of characters in a rom-com and I think for
designers it's navigating that tension between the ego right
and wanting to change the world and the service-oriented dynamic
and then also this tension between knowing what we think is
best for people and these these assumptions and the empirical
aspect of what we do like actually recording documenting
and measuring what actually happens.
So yeah, that's how I think about tension and assumptions
and back to this parallel between design thinking and
storytelling in a story you kind of set up this scenario, like
what happens when the alien ship shows up to Earth in some ways.
It's a question and the story that unfolds is an answer to
that question just as the how might we is a That kind of winds
up the tension that allows the design process to move forward.
Yeah. I think it's in astute
observation. There is certainly a parallel.
I think that tension is sort of inherently what drives both and
probably most Industries, right an entrepreneur is often defined
as someone who wants to solve a problem through the capital
system a social entrepreneur is someone who wants to solve a
problem in society and ultimately those problems are
Attentions right that would be another way to say them and so
in storytelling specifically there is the old adage that if
you don't have conflict, you don't have a story.
However, there's always conflict if you're willing to dig at all.
It's always there and I think the same is true.
We find and design research. There is always an assumption.
We're making that's not true. How much of what we believe to
be true actually is true and if you start from that premise and
you're willing to go in there and and Alan G.
Each place that you're starting to create from that I find is
the most powerful place and most resonant voice.
You can tell a story with and from a parallel perspective as a
designer. It's also the place I've found
you can design the greatest products the greatest Solutions
and ultimately even just the the greatest ideas from we have
identified these tensions, but we also have to just live them
and that's just an inherent part of being a designer being A
Storyteller so we're coming up on the end of our time together.
So just kind of end with a lightning round of Q combined
questions of I guess death that death and life.
So the first one is sleigh and then the second one is what's
giving you life. What are some myths
misconceptions out there accepted knowledge that you want
to Slayer dispel and then what's giving you life in terms of
inspiration of works of art or design or other things that
inspire you right now sure the first part of that something I
want to slay. Is our allegiance to the concept
of Truth back to this idea of tension.
I think the tension is the truth and we need to process that as
designers. Yes.
Yes, the Craftsman who have studied under a Goldsmith for
three years are a designer of jewelry.
Yes, absolutely. But so is the MBA who went to
Stanford D school to learn how to see the world differently.
We've got a both hold on to what we love and allow for the World
to Change at the same. Same time.
So that's the thing that I would like to slay right now.
Is that sort of the blockages that keep that from being the
reality? Right?
So if folks are being accepted as designers by business or
their self-identifying as designers just kind of let them
have that too right? There's a big enough tent for
that. I think it's up to us to design
the tent. So yes, I think there is a big
enough 10 for it if we choose for there to be but I'd also
like to slay our allergy to leadership.
Because I think ultimately we've left it to the CEOs and the CFOs
and all the other Seas for so long and we see a move there
only 18 as of right now. I think there's a new 19th cdo's
in the world Chief design officer is at large
organizations of 50,000 or more employees.
And I think we'll start to see that move more and more and more
as we start to get over our allergy to leadership.
We realize that we can actually design the entire organization
the skill set we have is poised to To remake Society if we
choose to so back to ambition, then finally what is giving you
life in terms of creative inspiration right now was giving
me life in terms of creative inspiration right now is this
strange synthesis at the crossroads of the myths.
We tell ourselves the stories. We tell ourselves that we
believe to be true that influence and change our lives
and ultimately create our decision matrices.
We make our decisions everyday from these stories.
We tell ourselves. And what happens at that
crossroads when we start to infuse it with design thinking
and when we start to actively realize that we're empowered and
we actually have this ability to move through a process.
That's measurable. That can change everything in
our current reality and the moment, you know, I go back to
what Gandhi said of, you know be the change you want to see in
the world and what would happen if we actually have the tools
and the ability and the creative wherewithal as well as the
confidence to change ourselves. We'd approach every conversation
a little bit differently. We come to it from a place of
security rather than a place of defense and and I think that
ultimately is the thing I'm most inspired by right now as I'm
starting to see that more and more and more out there.
And I think as those communities start to come together.
We're going to find ourselves not just problem solving or same
design as a problem-solution cycle, but rather for what it
really is, which is the ability to remake reality Jackie was
good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the show.
Check out Jack's book. Echo designs her way out of a
paper bag available wherever books are sold and thank you all
for tuning into this episode of design future natl a production
of aiga. The professional association for
design learn more about our design conference at design
conference dot aiga dot-org until next time.
I'm leash on Huang.