[MUSIC] Hello, everyone and welcome to the last
segment of The New Normal speaker series. My name is Gjoko Muratovski and I'm the
Director of the Ullman School of Design. So far, I had the pleasure of hosting
Carole Bilson, Karim Rashid, Bruce Mau and Steven Heller. My special and last guest is Don Norman. Don is a person who doesn't
need much introduction. He had an illustrious career in industry,
he established himself as a leading voice in academia,
and he's also a celebrated author. Don is also the co-founder of a new
global initiative that aims to change design education
as we know it today. This initiative has been generously
supported by IBM Design and endorsed by a number of other high
profile companies and institutions. Including the World Design Organization. I'm very proud to be a part of this
initiative as a member of the steering committee. So Don, let's provide some context. How did this initiative came about? >> I'm really concerned about
several different things. Design, first of all,
is not well understood and it's because of the history. If you look at the history of design,
it came from several different origins. One of them is advertising,
another one is the theatre. Some of the early great designers
were theater designers. And they, actually, they were
the ones who were most successful. They're the ones who had very
broad visions who could say when their client came to them. And said I want you to redesign the scale,
and this is a true story. I just lost the name of the designer. I have a book here someplace. He said okay, I will redesign the scale, the scale that butchers
use in their stores. However, in order to make it you
will have to build a new factory and I will design the factory for you. And what designer today could do that? And the same thing happened
with the World's Fair. He's the guy who did the 1939 or
whatever it was World's Fair in New York. And IBM... No, General Motors asked
him to do an exhibit. And there's going to be a relatively
small exhibit showing the future of cars and so on. And he said, why don't we do
an exhibit that's a future of cities. And I'll design the building that
you have to build to house this. And it turned out to be that incredible. It was this hit of the fair, but it costs
in those days like a million dollars, in today's days,
that would be 20-50 billion. And you sat there and you watch this
animated vision of the city and you saw these vehicles traveling by themselves and
sometimes, flying through the air. And then people had this little ride, you took a ride through the air,
around the city. The vision was incredible and
we don't have that today. And it's not just a vision,
it's the ability to convince important people like the CEOs,
to pay for it. Now, but that's one side of design coming from
theatre where you really get things big. The other side is from art. And it really bothers me that so many
schools of design are part of art schools. Because there is a big difference
between art and design. Yes, we have an aesthetic
side to what we do. But artists are wonderful, but
they are expressing themselves. And they're also trying to give you
new experiences and new thoughts and new ways of viewing the world. And even controversial views and
controversial ways of doing things. And that's wonderful and
it proves humanity. That's not what design is. Design, we are not designing for
ourselves. We're designing for the world, for other
people, to change society, hopefully for the better. >> Yeah, I understand,
>> But that doesn't come out of art schools. >> No.
Half of my education actually comes from very traditional European art schools and
art academies. And yeah, I experienced first
hand what you were saying. >> The designers that I admire most,
I will not name them. Almost every single one of them
was not trained in design. Look at my partner at IBM,
Karel Vredenburg, so Karel is basically IBM Design. It's very interesting, their story too. Because they bought a company and the president of the company
was Phil Goldberg. And so it was a company that did design
and Phil himself is not a designer. And they were hired by IBM,
they were bought by IBM. So they required Phil to work, stay with
IBM for three years, that's typical. You want the founder to stay there and pass on all the knowledge to someone and
so on. And after a year and a half or so, Phil
went to his boss and said, I hate it here. It's dull,
I can't do nothing exciting going on. You wanted me to stay, so you can learn
everything I knew, well, you did already. So can you let me go? And his boss intelligently said no. But here is what I want you to do. I want you to go around IBM,
take as much time as you like. Visit all of the places all around
the world and come back and tell me what needs to be done. And so Phil, did that and he came back,
and now to hear the story is misty, I'm gonna make up
the story which is close. I mean, but it's not. He met with the CEO. Ginni was her name at that point,
she has stepped down since then. And she asked him so
what did you discover? What is your recommendation? And he said, it's hopeless. And she said, why? She said, look,
you really have to change things and to change things I have to
hire a thousand designers. And she said, okay. And that was the beginning and by now
they've hired closer to 2000 designers. >> Above 2500. >> Yeah, they require them each to
take a pretty big training course. And if you're really an old
experienced designer, you still want to take a training course. And that way everybody is
thinking the same way. And in this course,
they work on projects, but they work on not made up projects,
real projects that IBM needs. In this training course when they design,
they come out with a line of patents and real things. And the next thing is he said [COUGH]
there's the rule that when there is, a we will not work with any
division unless they ask us. Because it doesn't help if
somebody doesn't want us. They have to want us. And then we tell the division, that we won't work with them unless
everybody in their vertical slice. From the lowest worker all the way up
to the top, has taken our courses. And don't worry about the C suite level,
the C suite and the CEO, they've already taken our courses. >> Of course. >> And that's because- In fact, I've
written a paper with Michael Meyer, who is a faculty member in the design lab at
the University of California, San Diego. And also part of the steering
committee that we're talking about. And his background, by the way. An undergraduate degree in physics,
and then an MBA from Harvard and he was in the Navy for
a while, in the nuclear Navy. But he ended up being an executive
at Frog Design, and then IDEO and then CEO of a major company in
San Francisco, a design company. And we wrote a paper
about design thinking. And we said if people love it,
it's wonderful... It's useless. It's fun, but it's useless because it
doesn't matter unless you do something. So design doing is what's important and
you can't do it in normal companies because the company doesn't
understand what designers are doing. And if you have a new radical idea, ooh,
that's a risk, my bonus is at risk. And so you have to change the company. So design doing, design thinking, yeah,
but you have to have design doing. And design doing means design
transformation of the entire corporation. And two companies I know of- SAP,
which actually had a chief design officer, and IBM which is taking this seriously. And another good one is Philips
which has a chief design officer who meets with the CEO like weekly. And that is so rare. There are so few large companies whose
designers are taken seriously like that. Procter & Gamble for a while was,
P&G, but that seems to have changed. And that's an issue with
with large companies, management is always changing
>> Well, Procter & Gamble has a global
design officer, Phill Duncan. >> That's good. >> That's a very, very high role. >> But it's as you know, it's very rare. So anyway, Karel, who by the way,
his training is in cognitive science. A field I invented which is interesting,
or helped invent. We said designers for the 21st century are
the ones who should change the world and we want more designers to
be the CEOs of company or at least the chief design
officers of a company. Victor Papanek in 1971, very famous
industrial designer at the time, wrote a book called Design for
the Real World. And the first sentence of the book was,
to paraphrase, there is no field more
dangerous than design. Then he said, well,
maybe there is a field more dangerous and that's advertising, who convinces people
to buy the crap that designers design. >> I know very well what
you're talking about. I have the book and that was a very
interesting debates in the early 1970s, and Papanek and others as well
have highlighted this topic. So let's kind of circle
a little bit more on that. In your paper that you wrote with
Michael Meyer, you're saying that there are interesting other fields and
professions that we can learn from who have already gone through this exercise,
who have changed and transformed. For example, medicine. I personally find is a very interesting
field that underwent significant transformation. Like in many ways, the work of the Victorian medical
professionals from the 19th century, if you look at it, nowadays it reads
like a script for a horror movie. Do you think that in 100 years from now,
people will be looking at the work that we are doing now as designers and
thinking the same about us? I mean, definitely Victor
pointed the finger at that. >> No, I think it's different. And the issue is this. So let me let me finish the Papanek story
because it's a partial answer to what you're saying. >> Sure. >> I think Papanek was wrong. And here's why, the sentiment he
was voicing was absolutely correct. But what he was wrong about was that
it was the fault of the designers as if designers could
do anything about it. And designers,
because of the way they're training today, designers are in the middle level. In a company, you're in the middle level,
you have to do what your boss tells you, or more important your boss's boss,
or else you're fired. You lose your job or if you end up
in if you're a practitioner in, say, a design studio, well,
your bosses are your clients. You have to do what they tell you,
or you don't get the job and therefore you can't pay salaries. And we have almost no say. The notion that I can
tell my client- well, you have to build a whole new factory
to build this brand-new scale. No way, it wouldn't work today. So that's one reason design
education must change. A second reason is that well,
I was pulled out of my fourth retirement. I had retired from UC San Diego. In 1993 I retired. And I went up to Apple and
became vice president and all that and I started a company in Nielsen
Norman Group which is still active, although I've retired from it. And I also ended up at- I founded
a startup which failed in Chicago. So I joined the computer science
department at Northwestern and started the Segal Design Institute,
co-started, and also a Master's degree in
Engineering Design and Innovation. Which those still are very powerful. And I retired from them. And I was living in Palo Alto,
California, very busy, very happy. I didn't have a job but I was busy. I was on lots of boards and I was giving
talks around the world and the head of UC San Diego came to my home and said,
please come back and start a design group. And I said no, I don't need a job. I don't want a job. And he convinced me in a second
trip to my home by saying, look, you can do anything you want,
with only two restrictions. One, it has to be important. Two, it has to be exciting. So I came back and we said the world
does not need another design school. We happen to be strong in human computer
interaction because in part that's where the field started. In the 1980s I wrote a book called
User-Centered System Design, and the initials UCSD are also the name of my
school University California, San Diego. Which was of help. One of the developments of User-Centered
Design today is Human-Centered Design. But we said we want to tackle the world's
most important societal issues. And you don't need a set of skills if I'm
gonna do a better medical procedure or I'm gonna try to cure hunger. Or clean water or better education. We need other skills and the words design thinking actually what we
need because design is a way of thinking. But in order to do this you better
know a lot more about the world, and traditional design education is focused
on four years of learning how to draw and learning about materials and
learning about form and structure. And as a result, people produce wonderful,
beautiful artifacts that I love. But if you take a look at Apple computers,
the world's best industrial designer makes beautiful, wonderful hardware,
but they don't understand people. And Apple computers used to be famous for
you could just pick it up and use it without ever reading a manual. And today on the iPad, or the iPhone,
everything is mysterious. No words. Because words are ugly. Just icons or even no icons and you have
to memorize all these ways of flipping and do you swipe up or down or left or
right or one finger or two fingers or three fingers or tap or tap and hold. Or do you swipe up halfway and
then hold your finger and do you have to swipe from not from the
very top or from partially down and down? It's crazy. Now we do, we kill the environment. But until people get into a position
of power, we can't change things. So I wanna change it but it's a bit
like journalism, more than medicine. Medicine was all folk medicine,
which was really not based on any science. And journalism was all folk tales and
business for that matter, too. So we looked at these change in education,
in medicine, in journalism, in law, and
in the business schools. All of them started as folk theories, people who were successful said I'll
teach everybody how I was successful. Which doesn't mean that actually what
they were doing was the right thing or it was a good craft and so but
they all started off as crafts. Design is a field of craftsmanship. And no.
That's what you wanna change and that's what we learned how
the business schools did it, how the business transformed themselves. And so we said let's do this. Let's try to gather and
it's a multiple year progress. Now the computer science
field has done that. And so what they did is they started,
they've done this now twice. They do it every ten years. They completely reviewed
the curriculum of computer science. And they proposed a whole bunch of
possible ways of teaching computer science. They allow it for
two-year community colleges. They allow it for people who
are going to simply run the computer centers of the world or
the server farms of the world. But they also want to go all the way up to
somebody at a major research university, whose goal was to become
a professor at that university. You need very different curriculum. So we wanna have a curriculum that
allows today's craft base to continue. They have to do change because the new
tools for doing design, a lot of the AI tools are wonderful, but they take away
the need for some of the craftsmanship. But then replace it with a need for great
aesthetic notions that you can describe, here are my constraints,
here are my goals. What do you suggest? No, that's no good. Yeah, that's a good direction,
do more of that. It's wonderful for designers because
instead of spending hours rendering or sketching what you're
doing is you're using your brain to say that's a really
good direction but it's wrong. Let's see if we can shape it. And we have to teach that, but we also wanna teach people about how
to work with multidisciplinary teams. Because in this new world, if I wanna cure
some of the diseases we have in San Diego. Yes, I do wanna send in
the medical people, but the diseases are often
caused by bad sanitation. So do we have to train about sanitation? But why is it bad sanitation? Well, because there
aren't any restrooms or places to clean yourself
in the middle of the city. And also a lot of people are homeless. Do you wanna cure the epidemics you
have to cure the homeless problem. Now that requires a very
different kind of training. But designers are ideally
equipped to do this. Because we don't know anything about any
of the topics and that's a good thing. Therefore, when we don't look
at the old solutions, we say, I don't understand why we do it this way. We ask stupid questions and a stupid question is the most
powerful question in the world. So when someone says, well,
that's how we've always done it. Then you say, okay,
why have you always done it that way? And pretty soon you discover, well,
maybe you didn't have to do it that way. And there's a whole new approach. And designers also focus on the people,
the needs of the people. All sorts of other disciplines
try to solve these problems, but they look at efficiency, and performance
metrics, and cost, and productivity. We look at the people. >> Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And this is what makes
I believe now design so important because we have brought
this human centered focus into all this mix which was previously
dominated by an engineering focus or material focus or
sales focus or marketing focus. But the person was never In
the forefront and we have brought that perspective into the mix,
which makes us very relevant nowadays. Interesting thing, Don,
is the multidisciplinary aspect and the approach that you described just
now already exists in the domain of crisis leadership, which as a parallel
has not been looked into this way. And just for me, I just got exposed to
that because I had a training in crisis leadership in at the Harvard
Kennedy School of Government on a completely unrelated thing,
nothing to do with design. It was purely how to deal with crisis. I took that a couple of years ago,
that training. And when we started going
through different scenarios, I could just see all of that that you
just said just laying out perfectly. One interesting example was-
>> So why did you say had
nothing to do with design? That's a failure of design because it
should be exactly the sort of thing designers are good at. >> Absolutely, but we were never educated to think of ourselves in that way
>> Yes, which is again part of the problem,
but it was exactly that thing. And we were looking at like this type of
examples where let's say you have a major catastrophe. And the city is burning,
an entire city is on fire. And a fire department you will
assume will know what to do. They don't, because they don't
deal with a crisis on that level. You assume that every job that they
take is a crisis or that an ambulance, that every job that you take is crisis. But for them that is routine. It's not a crisis,
it's a crisis for a random person. For them is routine. But when the scale of that changes,
and the context of that changes, for them this also becomes a crisis. And they're not prepared or
equipped to handle it. And this is where you need to look at
things in a completely different way. And one of the things was
we need a city planner, we need architects,
we need sanitation, water, whatever. So you need to put every one who
has any idea of what makes a city function to come together and
figure out a new solution. Because even people who
deal with fire every day, they can't address it because this
is not a normal circumstance. So designers in a way are really
great at making these connections and facilitating this conversation. And asking stupid questions,
as you say, because it's like sometimes it does take this type of questions
to provoke these conversations. But how do we teach that? [LAUGH] So this is like, this is
something why we need to kinda move into this new paradigm shift
of education as well, because- >> Well, we teach it by having people work on these issues because almost every
city in the world has crises and problems inside the city. And that people in the university often
are not aware of it, they're isolated. But actually, students can go out and
work with people. But another example is at RCA,
the Royal College of Art and they have a joint design
programme with Imperial College, which is an engineering school,
basically across the street from RCA. And that's wonderful because when they
work together with the engineers, they worked on some major,
important problems in the City of London, which they were real problems. And that's one way to train people. You've got to learn to work
with the other disciplines. And that's hard because
the other disciplines use the same words that we used,
meaning different things. And it's also in part, a lot of the other disciplines don't
understand how to focus on people. Let me give an example of today's crisis,
the COVID pandemic. And the problem is the public
health people say, and the infectious disease people,
what we have to do is isolate people for at least two weeks, so
we know that they're free of the disease. And we have to be very careful not
to have too close a distance and we have to also wear masks. And they have to be the right masks and
they have to be thermally fitted, etc. And this has been going on well for
me, I'm in my home now, and I've been in my home
basically since March. So that's what seven months? And what happens is the people
who've looked at the medical issues didn't really understand
the economic implication. And in addition, they didn't
understand the behavioral implications. So the reason that they managed
to quell the epidemic in many, many parts of the world and it went down. And then so we said okay people, you can
go back and start enjoying life again and invoke the epidemic to resume. Because people said even though there
was still a lot of disease around. They said, I can finally eat out, I can
see my friends, I can dance, I can drink. And no, but somebody with understanding... we needed more people who
understood the economic impact and the behavioral impact in the beginning. And today we're beginning to realize
that locking down everybody is the wrong approach, because not everybody is
highly susceptible to the disease or where there's no pocket. But what it does is destroy the economy. So, yes, if you wanna be a designer, you
need to know enough about the economy, and about human behavior and about disease. And about managing people and about working with very
many different disciplines. >> And I really liked at the beginning
you started with the example from the 1939 World Fair in New York. Because that I think
was maybe the first and the last grand World Fair
that had such a big ideas. And designers were actually pushing
the boundaries of the time. I mean, even somebody like Raymond Loewy,
who was a stylist, at the time actually proposed
the design for a rocket port. I mean, 1939, it was quite interesting. And this is also little kind of
connection that I also wanted to make with Papanek and so on. I think that it comes
down to the designers. Raymond Loewy was also managed to
push his ideas to a point where manufacturers will change how they
manufacture things because he said so. And we actually discussed this topic
with with Bruce Mau just recently, where all these issues that designers
have been causing was mainly due to lack of proper education. They were not aspiring to do anything
more than what they were doing. Today things are very different. And I have many of our graduates,
they go and they try to change their
companies from within. They will push and
advocate for sustainability. They will push and
advocate for racial equality. They are relentless. And they don't get necessarily
sometimes leadership roles but, they try from a certain position where
they are trying to change things. >> [CROSSTALK]
>> And I'll tell you why it doesn't work. But it's like people watching
me I was turning here. I just looked it up. What I was talking about in the World's
Fair was what was called Futurama, and it was Norman Bel Geddes who did it. >> Yes.
>> He's the one who built this bond. And you're right, there were a few of the
early designers who had these dreams and moreover could make them happen. But here's why your people who say we
must have sustainable products are not making it. And the story I tell, it's a slightly
different story, but it's the same story. Designers come to me and
say my company doesn't understand me. And I finally tell them they ought to
bring designers into the decision making to decide what product is
made from the beginning. And I say okay, so
how do you tell your bosses? And I say and
remember who is your customer? And they tell me the person
in the store who buys or the person who does this and I say no. Your customer is the person who pays you. Your customer is the person you work for. Not your boss,
cause your boss probably understands you. It's the boss of your boss. And how do you go and you talk to them? And they say, yeah, we talked to
the highest level of the administration. And we told them what wonderful work we
do and how the customers love it, and the difficulties the customers have
otherwise and the prizes we won. And I said, I used to be a vice
president at a large company. And if somebody would come to me and
told me that about their work, I would have said, yes,
thank you very much. We know you're very good
that's why we hired you. And now if you'll excuse me,
I have to go back to work. If you wanna be human-centered design, you better understand the people
who you are designing for. And they are rewarded not by your prizes,
they are rewarded by increased sales, decreased costs, increased margins. And if you have a new idea
that what you do is yeah, you may wanna draw some pictures or
show them prototypes. But what you really wanna do is you
want to show them a spreadsheet showing increased sales and profits. And the designer says, how can we do that? But we don't know,
nobody knows the numbers. And I say doesn't marketing insist that
you add these three figures that you hate and how do they do it? They make up the numbers. You can make them up. The fact that you don't know how to
make them up, ask marketing to help you. And the executives are very smart. They know the numbers are made up, because they used to make them
up themselves on their rise. >> [CROSSTALK]
>> What they do is, they look at it and they say, does this make sense? >> You're absolutely correct. Absolutely, I agree with
you like 200% on this. And in fact, because I always like to look at things
from a very strong business perspective. Just because of this very thing, I didn't had that business
education when I started. I came from classic art schools and
art academies. And one of my first jobs
was to sit in a board or to sit on a board meeting
with a large company. Japanese. And to explain why design matters. I didn't had the vocabulary,
didn't had the language. I had my arts language. I could tell them why
things are beautiful, why things are aesthetic and so on. But I could not explain to these people
who couldn't care less about that, why this matters to the business. So this is why I started a lot
studying business on my own time. Not as a part of any education or
anything. Just personally learning
this business vocabulary, so that I can explain why design matters
to people who make these decisions. And even now, just recently,
I was giving a presentation, I talked to a very large
corporation here in the US. And the design team they were telling me,
exactly these things. We wanna do these great things. We know what people like and stuff, but
we can't just push our company to change, how they do certain things. It's like, what should we do? It's exactly what you said. So you need to understand the following. Those people who make this decision,
they're people too, and they have their own anxieties and
they have their own problems. And they have their own worries, and they
have their jobs to worry about as well. So you need to understand
what their problems are, and you need to translate how your
suggestion is gonna fix their problems. >> I have a rule,
I guess what I tell people, your job is to get that person promoted. >> Yes, that's true. Because it should be collective,
it should make sense. And nowadays, and this is the thing
that I often advocate to people who said I don't wanna work for this company,
I don't like the practice they do. I said, maybe that's exactly
why you should work there and help that company be better. Because you're not gonna change
anything just being on the sidelines. And this is a very big shift that we
have seen socially and economically. While many of these topics,
like social innovation, sustainability and so on, were on the margins,
a very small voice somewhere, on the outskirts, but
now they're mainstream. And it requires that whole
conversation to change. It's not that the topic is a problem,
it's how you tell the story. And if you can tell the story in a way
that resonates, to these decision makers, and that can help them elevate
their own roles within the company, then you have a winning formula. >> Yes, let me give you an example. There's a company a nonprofit
organization in Colorado in the Rocky Mountains,
called the Rocky Mountain Institute. And it's run by a man named Amory Lovins,
or started by a man named Amory Lovins. And he said the people say they
wanna have more sustainability. And we wanna have less waste,
and we wanna, etc, and less packaging waste and
so on and so forth. And Amory has made this point over and
over again, he's a big systems thinker. And he says if you try to convince some
company to do something cause it's good for the world, they may listen
to you and they may even change. But the next time an economic
crisis happens, or the next time they change leadership,
they'll stop. What you have to do is don't convince
them it's good for the world. They can figure that out for themselves,
convince them it's good for their company. That if they do sustainability,
they will actually make more money. Because if you go look at the waste you
throw away every day, in the company. Or go look at the smoke
coming out of the smokestack. That's money going out of the smokestack,
and the waste is money. >> Absolutely. >> So if you can change things,
and so what he does is he, again, it's putting it in
the language of your customer. Hey, if you do it this way,
you actually will be more profitable, as well as being good for the world. >> Yeah that's exactly what they say. I mean sustainability is often,
by most of these people, is often misunderstood concept. I explain very simply. Sustainability is making more with less. Higher profits,
bigger margins with less waste and so on. While you do not need to compromise
the quality of the product. In fact, in many ways if you do it proper,
it's a better product. And you know, Don, what are the actual
best models of sustainable businesses that have never
been promoted in such way? The luxury brands. The luxury brands,
like small companies in Switzerland and family companies in France that
make very expensive jewelry, that make very expensive bags,
that make expensive watches. They're the most sustainable because
they have a very small footprint. They work with local craftsmen and
artisans. They have all real, genuine materials. And you don't throw away these products. They're designed and
made to last for generations. You pass them on to the next generation. So they have the best quality, everything. If you create a checklist and you say this the kind of the criteria
that sustainable products needs to meet, and you put those products on the side,
they'll tick all of them. And they're super appealing. And nobody will argue with that. I've been giving a lecture about these
things, actually some years ago in India at a big conference- it
was called Design for a Billion. And I was giving an example that Prius and
I show commercial for Prius. And I said look, this is not a car
that you dream about owning. This is your guilty conscious telling you,
you should probably buy this car. But then again, on the other side,
here is the BMW i8, even more sustainable than the Prius. And this is a car you dream about owning. And the fact that it's sustainable, and that it's kinda completely
environmentally good, it's irrelevant. It's a beautiful, great product and
people will aspire to own that product. And by doing that you're
shifting the whole thing. So it's about using design, even on that very base level-
the aesthetic elements of design. You can use that to
envision a better future. >> Yeah, except you'll have to change
your example because the BMW I8 failed. >> Well, at the time... [CROSSTALK]
>> Today's version is a Tesla, the big one the Model S
>> But at the time I just saw them in Munich. They were just coming out,
I was working with BMW at the time and they just came out and
it was just like a dream on four wheels. It was incredible at the time. >> I was actually consulting for
BMW when they were developing the i3. >> Another beautiful car. >> Ugly car, but I like the ugliness. That Prius in the same sense,
Prius by making it look different, they didn't do this on purpose. They thought it was just
an advertising stunt and they were just gonna sell a few of them. But because it looked different, it told
everybody else I'm driving a Prius, and I'm therefore socially conscious. And that's why it caught on. When the very wealthy actors in
Hollywood started buying Priuses. Wow!
And I think that the i3 has been somewhat
similar because it looks different. >> Yes,
>> The problem is the i3 came out too early and so
it's technology was limited. >> Well, you know the predecessor of
all of that, the General Motors EV1. That's a funny story. We have it here in the school. >> I know that story. In fact, I have a friend who bought
the very first one in California, but that's a different story. >> Yeah I know, I know. But we do have it in our collection
actually, as a gift from General Motors. it's incredible. All right, well,
let's get back on to the topic. So what do you see are the main challenges
that we need to overcome in order to change the way we teach design? We both teach design in some ways, so. >> Well, first of all,
I don't wanna start with the portfolio. We get people with their portfolios
which is, again the art based approach. Now, portfolios are useful, we actually
have a lot of engineering companies and they want to know-. So what kind of engineering have you done? But I want to do is, I want people
with a well rounded background. So we are for example at UC San Diego, we are thinking of not even having
an undergraduate major in design. A minor yes, but not a major, but
we want you to major in something else and yeah minor in design and
then we might have a graduate program. We give an MDes degree, And in the United
States we often give the MFA- Master of Fine Arts- to designers, and I hate
that because we aren't in the fine arts. So actually many schools... Europe mostly, gives the MDes. And Carnegie Mellon. Their design school. Now when their catalog I said, on the internet has a big statement about
why we give the MDes and not the MFA. We are a learned design school,
but I want a broad education. So the normal four year university
gives you a wide range of education. Now you can major in anything you want. But not yet in design. That's now if you wanna be a craftsman
that isn't gonna work, but craft school is gonna
have to be different. And so part of what we want to do is
have curriculum that will allow you to become a crafts person. But also, you can move up in the world
by understanding the politics, the other fields, everything that you and
I have just been talking about. It's going to be a hard job
that we expect this will take. It's already been about
a year we're working on it. It's gonna take another year or
two and then it'll take maybe five or 10 years before schools
started adopting it. But we have to make this change. We have to change the way
people think about design. It's a way of thinking of solving
the world's most important problems. And, yeah,
>> So, I know and because we're both working on this,
it's a very long project ahead of us. But even today, we can see that design
education is already changing in some fundamental ways, as a result of all
the issues that we're facing today. The global pandemic for one, social and
racial injustice, climate change, and income inequality. Now, what have you observed so far as being the most interesting
initial change that has taken place? >> In many ways it's the understanding
that we actually have something to contribute. So, I am being asked more and
more to join companies. In fact, I got request to join
a board just yesterday for a very interesting medical company. I'm turning them all down because
I want to focus on a few things. But I'm also asked to give talks
to a wide variety of companies. And again, I don't give talks anymore. I do what you and I are doing. I say, I will give a talk for four or
five minutes and then I will open up for questions from the audience because
that way I can address the issues I know that you care about. And if am asked to give an hour
major talk to a company, and not how do I know what
they really care about? So I am answering questions. But again these questions therefore
range from the nature of the company, the nature of the products,
the nature of society, about what is the future going to bring. See, one of the problems we also face is
the way that the current economics works. The financial models that are used
they are too short term and there's this myth which
unfortunately has become sort of accepted that a company owns its
responsibilities to its shareholders. Because technically
the shareholders own the company. And not to their employees,
not to the customers, not to the community in which they live. And that's wrong, and I think it's evil. And what that leads to is
the emphasis when short term process. Every quarter, every three months, you're
judged on how profitable you've been. But if you really wanna do
something important and essential, it might be years. The investor Warren Buffett is
a really good example of somebody who understands this. When he buys a company,
he says I'm never gonna sell it. I'm buying a company that's in for the long term that will make
a difference in the long term. And we need to have more- we need to, we have to change the way we promote and
reward our business executives. So for designers to succeed,
we have to change how we tell we treat our business executives because we want them
to be rewarded for long term benefits. >> Yeah.
>> To company and to society. So, but by the way, all these movements
are not when I say these things. I'm not the only person. There's a large number of people,
major economists, Nobel prize winning economists, who are saying the
same thing, and many business leaders, and there's a whole new type of
corporation now called the B Corp. The socially responsible corporation
which is part of their charter, is they owe the responsibility to
society and to the customers and so on. And so all of this is wonderful and I
actually would like to have a revolution. And when people say, well, there are lots
of other people already saying this, I say yes, you can't have
a revolution without revolutionists. And so what part of what I'm hoping
that the team that we are assembling, which is now about 450 people to change
design education and people from all over the world from all different cultures
and countries and ways of thinking. We might have a revolution. There 'll be a gentle revolution,
but a revolution in thinking. Because look, one of the things we've done
is we destroyed the indigenous customers. Basically, [INAUDIBLE]
Europe. For example,
the people of Europe took over Africa and the King of Belgium divided up
the land in Africa among all the different countries,
the European countries. That's horrible. And the British took over India and
the cotton trade. And they helped in that institute slavery, because you need cheap labor to
change the cotton into cloth. And it's a Western imperialist's. And one of the things that happened
is the British went into India and said, you guys don't know how
to run a company, a country. You're under educated and
maybe you're fundamentally stupid. So we will take over for you and
show you how to run a country. And that's horrible. And in fact, they were finally kicked out. And that's what designers do. We're called into solve the problem
of water supply in Africa, say. We go in for a month or two months and
do our design research and say, we understand the problem. And then we do our ideation and
our testing, our prototype, and we come back and say,
here's a solution to your problem. And we wonder why it's not accepted. It's because we didn't, first of all, we
can't tell people what their problem is. And tell people what their solution is. It has to come from them. And so we have to change how we do design
into what I'm calling at UC San Diego, we call community-driven design. We go in a community, we find the people who are already trying
to solve the problem, so we help them, we tutor them, mentor them,
facilitate what they're doing. We don't tell them what to do, because
they understand their problems well. They don't have to do design research
to understand what the issues are, they live them. >> I have actually seen that
particular problem that you were just pointing out now in Australia
with architects and so on. And with government support. When they're looking at the indigenous
community, the Aboriginals. Who have lived there since
the beginning of time, and they say like, well,
we need to help them. And here we go and
we'll build them these houses, and they build this typical cookie cutter
houses that you may just see in any typical suburb in Australia and they
plant them in the middle of the Outback. And then they come year later and
they see these houses, damaged, destroyed, whatnot, kind of neglected. And then they say- there you go! These people can't live in these houses. We tried, but it's their fault, they
don't know how to live in these houses. And I was like, this is absolutely
ridiculous because that is showing complete disregard and
disrespect to their way of life. What houses, they've been living there way
before any of these people came there. And they have their own way of
how they live with the land and they have their own way how they're
cooking, and so on and so on. And so none of the things that they do,
that are part of their lives, even fits within that construct. And they place them in these houses and they wonder why they can't
function in these houses. And this is because they're trying really
hard to make these houses their own. So, they try to change the oven to
replace it because they cook differently. They try to remove certain things because
they do certain things differently. But from a Western perspective,
this is being seen as like, there you go, you failed. Even in my own my own home city, which was an incredible experiment
in the 1960s and 1970s. With great support from the UN and
UNESCO when that whole city was reconstructed after it was
destroyed by an earthquake. And it was led by a global team, the plan was actually built
on the concept of Tokyo. The Urban Plan of Tokyo. And this was led by Kenzo Tange,
the famous Japanese architect. He designed the concept for Skopje. It was a remarkable example of brutalist
architecture and new visions and concepts. And I recall, because I studied it in
great detail and I have to say for me personally, it inspired me a lot
just growing up in that type of city. My uncle was the Mayor of the city
when they were leading these changes. And despite the best efforts of the urban
planners who were from UNESCO, and other urban planners
from around the world. When they were building these buildings,
they had not taken into account how certain communities used to live
in different parts of that city. And they just further destroyed
all these neighborhoods and put these people into these
high-rise concrete blocks. And they were wondering later on,
why these people don't like to live there. And that was again,
it was great ideas, great visions, but a disconnect with
the actual communities. [CROSSTALK] It's Yeah. >> One of my favorite
books is written by a, I'm not sure what his field is,
he's an economist, William Easterly, he wrote a book called,
The Tyranny of Experts. And what he's saying is, when we use
a major problem we call in the world experts and they are experts and
they understand what the issues are. But an expert is someone who has
an abstract level of knowledge and understanding. The abstraction is important and
that's how you can take your expertise and understand the issues and
what the problems are. But you don't understand the people,
the community, how they live, the kinds of abilities they have,
the things they dislike. And so we can spend hundreds of billions
of dollars over the last many decades with the sort of project you just talked
about it and the two different ones. >> There have been working on this for
over 20 years on it. >> And they're wasted, so, that's why you have to bring in
the experts who are good with their stuff. But they're wrong,
it's that they're incomplete. And that's again what I want
to train designers to do that. We go in, and
that's what our design research is about, to understand the people. But I also want to do co design,
community driven design, where we enable and facilitate the people
to come up with our solutions. Trying to take the way
that Tokyo is designed. It's a mess, in that there
are no house numbers in Tokyo. When you get instructions in Tokyo,
they try to say, well you go untll you see this bank. And then you turn left until you see
this department store and then it is. Wow, I wouldn't want to copy that and
it does not fit and it is completely different culture. It's fine for
the Japanese who grew up that way, so, yeah, the tyranny of experts. And that's why we need a whole different
approach to solve all these major problems. And I can think of no better
group of people than designers, to be the people who can
put it all together. >> Yeah. >> Except ,today's
designers aren't up to it. >> Yeah, I know. [CROSSTALK] I know, and personally,
I think that co-design is probably the best thing that has
happened to design in a long time. As a concept, just forcing designers to
collaborate with the people who they're actually designing for and taking their feedback on board and
co creating solutions together. It takes that whole
arrogance out of design. In fact, architects have
even even greater arrogance, historically speaking,
with their attitude. >> Architects are rewarded, they're
rewarded prices based on a photograph of the model taken from a position
where nobody would ever be, unsightly overhead, and
it's all based on the exterior appearance. [CROSSTALK] Without how the inside works. >> Yeah, design for
a long time was awarded in the same way, the user was completely removed. >> That's why I really
dislike museums of design, if you look at the MoMA,
the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The design curator. I've argued with her a lot. I think she agrees with me but
the problem with her exhibits is, what can you exhibit? You can't exhibit the thought
processes that went into deciding what direction to go. If you do co-design with a participant,
that's a very complex story to tell. You show artifacts. She shows this beautiful coffee pot and
you show this whatever. >> No, I know. there are things that I like about
Art Museums and Art Galleries and things that I don't like. Actually, I think that MoMA particularly
doesn't do a good job of curating stuff or displaying them well, for that matter. You're right. Hewitt Cooper actually did
a really good job few years ago, when they were looking at
the social aspect of design. >> That's one of the few large
museums solely devoted to design, so they can spend a lot of time trying to
explain what were the thought processes. >> Yeah. >> In fact what I'd love
to see with the museum, only few museums do this- Here
are all the failed attempts. Here's what we started with. Here's why it didn't work. >> Yeah.
>> That's how you learn. Designers don't like to talk
about their failures, but it's the failures which
are the best teaching vehicle. >> Procter & Gamble actually have that,
and they have a Museum of Innovation, which is their own thing. So they have different products
that they have created. It's really beautiful,
it's inside the corporate headquarters. And they started developing another
section which is about their failures, about products that they created and
they failed. And often the executives go on tours and
visits, and it has a proper curator and everything. And they go and try to understand
what went well, what was the context, why it went well. And what failed and why it failed and
what has this taught us. >> Now here's what I want you to do. Next time I visit you in Cincinnati,
we do that museum. >> Absolutely,
I will show you my museum as well. The Ullman Design Museum [CROSSTALK]
>> I think I've seen your museum. >> I extended it a little bit more,
I added more stuff now. But yeah, I have my own philosophy
of how I go about curating stuff. >> [CROSSTALK]
>> I see my book in the upper right-end just above your head. >> Two of them, I have Emotional Design,
and The Design of Everyday Things, >> Yeah, I see it, too. >> Don, I think that we reached the point
of the time where we scheduled for the meeting. But I really enjoyed talking with you. Do you have a hard stop or
do you want to talk a little bit more? >> I can talk. >> All right, because I always
like talking with you, anyway. So, I think we're just starting to peel
off the onion of the conversation. So let's take another
look at design education. Industry plays a much bigger role in
the design education model than most people realize. We often tend to use academic
rankings to determine the quality of an educational institution. How good a design school really is it's
not something that can be quite measured by academic rankings alone. So a good design school according to me is
measured by the professional success of its alumni. And by how many companies want to
employ their design graduates. Many people think that
it's the design school and the university who dictate the curriculum,
but this is not actually always the case. In most cases design educators are simply
trying to interpret the needs and the demands of industry, and to translate
them in a form of a curriculum. And if they fail to do that, then their students will not
be employable as designers. It's kind of like a closed loop here. Like in our case,
in the Ullman School of Design, for 150 years we have worked together and
alongside industry to prepare a design workforce that will serve
the needs of this industry. And as of recently, we made a conscious
effort not to follow existing practices in industry, but to lead by example. Now this doesn't mean that we're
disregarding whatever industry is doing, because we still need to hit
certain benchmarks for industry. But we have made significant progress to
change certain practices in some areas. And we have been very successful in some
of these areas like transportation design, for example. Now this is not a change that
can happen overnight, but it's a change that can
nevertheless happen. So you have come from industry into
academia to lead such a change, more specifically at the University
of California in San Diego. So I was really interested to know
how has your own professional background influenced your academic work? >> Yep, dramatically. So to test the comment on ratings. The complaint that you made about
ratings applies to every discipline, not just design. That the ratings are popularity things,
and we've learned the wrong
thing from science. We've learned the power of measurement,
so we try to measure everything. And how great your education
was is not easy to measure. So we measure whatever we can measure,
even though it's not the right thing. But then we soon forget that what we're
measuring isn't what we really care about, and we simply use the measurement. It's really horrible. You're a Dean so you probably get these questionnaires that
you're asked to review other schools. And that's how they form the ratings,
and I get the same thing. I don't know!
How do I know what really goes on inside the schools, but I still have to rate
them based on some weird reputation. >> [LAUGH]
>> It's really done badly. So one of the reasons, by the way,
to another point you made. Our steering committee has people
who are practitioners, and who are academics, and people who
are senior officers in businesses. And what we have to do is we have to also
get the people from the decolonization movement. This is a multi-floorism movement. We have to get the people who have other types of approaches to
design on our committees. And that's the next step we will
take in the next month or two. A lot of work to do this,
it's a lot of work to organize it. Now, my own background is interesting
because I started off as an electrical engineer. And I went to MIT,
got a degree in electrical engineering. I then wanted to really
work on computers and I went to the University of
Pennsylvania for graduate school. Because that's where the first
American computers were developed. Except when I got there, I had a Master's
degree in electrical engineering, but they didn't have any work in computers. And they said, we're thinking of
starting something in computers. And if you stay maybe you
can be the first student. >> [LAUGH]
>> And then psychology came, psychology hired a physicist to be
the new chair of the department. And they hired a mathematician to
be one of their senior professors. And so I talked to the new Chair. He said, you don't know anything
at all about psychology? Wonderful. And so I switched to psychology where I
studied sensory psychology, how we hear. I did my PhD thesis on
sort of a problem that it's called psychoacoustics, how we hear. And that, with my engineering background,
made that perfect. In fact, I got the degree
in two years in psychology. And then when I wanted a job, my advisor,
who was the mathematician, Duncan Luce. He sat me down and said,
where do you wanna go? And we talked and we said, Harvard or MIT. And so I went and
I interviewed Harvard, and then I interviewed MIT and
I chose Harvard. You got jobs very differently
in those days than today. And so I went to Harvard, and
that's where I learned psychology. George Miller and Jerry Bruner had
started something called the Center for Cognitive Studies. I didn't even know what
the word cognitive meant, but that was a really great
learning experience for me. And Harvard was a good place to go. So everybody would go through Harvard and
give lectures and visits. And I got to meet all of the major people. I had lunch with Noam Chomsky every week,
and with major philosophers and so on. And that was a big influence on me. And then what happened was
the new campus in San Diego which is UC San Diego was just starting. And one of my friends said, hey,
they're gonna make me a job offer. Why don't you come with me? And I said? And so that was like on a Saturday,
and then on Monday I get a phone call from UCSD
asking me to come and interview. But what was interesting is I had this
wide variety of background and interests. And a wide variety of people
that came through Harvard, that I began to understand and
talk to and write papers with. And when I went to UC San Diego
because I accepted their job. We started a field called
Human Information Processing Psychology, which for the first time put science
behind the teaching of psychology. Psychology up to that point was,
here's a person who did an experiment they had this result, and
here's another person and another person. It was that you had to
memorize all this stuff. And as an engineer I didn't
ever wanna memorize. In engineering what you learned is,
here's a couple of fundamental principles. And now you can derive
everything you need to know, you don't have to memorize anything. And that's what we tried
to change psychology into. And the field of
Human Information Processing Psychology became Cognitive Psychology. And then I became distressed that
psychology was still very narrow, and had its own methods of doing
experiments and results. And so I helped start the first department
of cognitive science where we brought in neuroscience, we brought
in artificial intelligence. We brought in linguistics,
we brought in anthropology and sociology. And it was really a powerful
department and still it is. And so my whole background
has been leaching off and somehow rather I've learned how to step
back and say what's the real issue? And in fact, the way I work
over the years is interesting, because it it bothers a lot of people. I always work on something
I don't understand. In fact, when I was asked to start the
design group at UC San Diego, there were two friends of mine who were already in
San Diego and I said let's do it together. But for the first two years,
I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know what we should do,
what we should focus on. I knew what I didn't wanna do, which was do conventional human-computer
interaction, which we were good at. I said wait, there's lots of people
good that we don't need another one. And I didn't wanna do conventional design. And how do I put it together? And I eventually came by the third year,
we're now in the seventh year by the third year we started
to get the right direction. But it was really important that I spent
this time exploring and experimenting. It might, because I was an executive
in several different companies, large companies, including my own. I also understood the very importance of
business, and how business survives, and what is necessary to do this. And moreover, the people that
impressed me the most in Apple, were the product managers. And our product managers,
they can be trained in, I don't know, in Italian literature,
it didn't matter what your background was. What they had to do was
they had to step back and say what is involved in this large,
in this product. We have to worry about the supply chain,
we have to worry about the costs. We have to worry about
the existing base of customers. We have to worry about the timetable, we have to get this out by
the Christmas buying season. We have to worry about the factories
that are going to manufacture it, and when they need to have the information. We have to worry about the the designers,
yes. And the engineers, yes, and
the marketing people, yes. And the sales people, yes, and the
stocking of the stores with the devices. And they were wonderful of doing that,
because they went across and they manage the personalities, and
the feuds, and the fights that went on. And all these are in my background,
and that's my training. And that's why I'm really
believing in systems. You have to think about the system,
and you can't just solve one piece. You have to understand how
they all fit together. And the more I work in design,
design to me is the application of the knowledge that we've
learned in the university. Most of the university is filled with
really deep wonderful thinkers who don't know how to do things. And the designer's job is to understand
and use what their insights and actually accomplishing. So what I wanna do is expand the field
to allow all sorts of new directions. Finally every field is like that. If you take look any field whatsoever, the any department in a university
the people are so varied. That the person on this part of the field
let's say computer science, doesn't even understand what this other person's
other area of computer science does. Or psychology, or philosophy,
or mathematics, or whatever field you wish, and
that's how design will grow. And it's okay because we all
do share a few common things. So one of the things we're
developing as you know, we're gonna have what we call tier one
topics that every designer must know. And one of them has to do with how you do
design research, and how you evaluate. And how you understand people and
put that together with the new complexities of social behavior and
technology. But they will then express
that in very different ways, sometimes really neat products that I
keep on my dining room table or whatever. And sometimes going off to other countries
and changing the educational system, or helping change their medical system,
or their economic system. So we have to prepare people. We don't know what's gonna happen,
I must say this is what I learned at MIT. MIT was really wonderful, I remember
professors telling the class how the industry was complaining that after
you ended up with your MIT degree and you went to work for industry you were
helped, you didn't know what to do. And it took six months or a year before
you got to be good at what you were doing. And they were proud of that. They said, because if we taught you how to
behave properly on day one in the company, we'd be teaching you wrong. Because that stuff goes out
of date in a year or two. We are teaching you so that for
the rest of your life, you will be always up to date with
those huge fundamental principles and you've learned how to learn. And that's true. I am still pretty much up to date in my
knowledge of electrical engineering and communication and computing. Because I've learned it myself,
I keep studying, I keep learning. I keep talking to experts. I am on lots of technology committees. It's not what I learned in school. What I learned in school was how to learn. And again, the fundamental principles and
that's what I wanna teach our designers. The fundamental principles of human
behavior, interaction with technology, interaction with society,
societal issues, those don't change. The way we address them will change. >> I appreciate that, but
that is one side of conversation. I was also interested to
learn what kind of personal changes are you experiencing right now, even in your role as the director
of the UCSD Design Lab and so on? And we discuss these things often when we
have our meetings about the changes itself that we are experiencing, as we are moving
forward to the future of design education. And even with a thing like this, a speaker
series like this, who should we invite? Who should say, what kind of voices should
be heard and represented in this process? And then know that you and Karel Vredenburg from IBM Design have made
a very, very, very significant effort, to ensure that different voices
are heard and represented. So tell more about that. >> So the thing that I have
spent a lot of time on and learning about It's basically,
let me call it institutional racism but there's a wonderful book
called Monoculture and the problem is the world
has a monoculture. That is to say, the leaders in
the world kind of think the same way, so we say we should hire people from
other countries, we should hire Blacks. We should hire people form Latinos,
we should hire people from Asia, we should hire people from Africa,
we should hire people from Latin America. And that way we have diversity and diversity everybody knows is good because
it brings in different points of view. No, that's wrong and the reason is
wrong is because all the people who are successful that will pass
the test, well we try to hire, we always say, I'm not a racist,
I treat everybody the same. And when I evaluate people,
I treat them all the same but I you know, but I look for quality and
I try to hire the best people. I don't care what their gender is,
I don't care what their race is, I don't care what their culture is. I wanna know people who are really good,
well, yeah, it means I wanna get people who think just
like me and so that without realizing it. I'm a racist, and
that's called institutional racism, where it's part of the fact that the whole
institute like the university I'm in, for that matter or the country I'm in,
for that matter the world. Has all adopted the same Western mode of
thought and Western belief system and that change is good and we're making
progress and progress is good. Sometimes it's called modernism and then you begin to realize
there other points of view. And I have finally begin to realize that
because I bought into this monoculture, I am a racist without knowing it. And that has to change and
that means changing though not just me, it's changing how we do
things in the university. And that's not just it. It's how we do things in
the entire educational system. And that's not just it. it's a larger change in
society that has to happen. So we are trying hard to bring
that into our educational project. People, basically
the disadvantaged people. People I have some favorite
candidates who I know are in Africa, and who are also in India,
and in Latin America. And I wanna hear the people with in fact,
I'm in a discussion group completely aside a different discussion
group with some of the leaders. In fact, people keep telling me there's
a person called Arturo Escobar, who we really have to bring into our
project and do I know Arturo Escobar. And the answer is every week I have
a two-hour conversation with him and the person who was his PhD
advisor many years ago Arturo, retired and two other people,
so it's a very small group, but we are looking very hard at the different
worldviews that different societies have. And how we can reconcile them and put
them and benefit from an understanding. And let me tell you some of those
worldviews are described in a language I do not understand,
yes, it's in English. But the worldview is described in such a
way that it just makes no sense to me and that's my problem. It's because I'm so used to our rational, logical way of thinking that when
there's a different point of view. It's taken me a long time to learn and
that's what I'm struggling with because I feel that is really
important I understand this. >> How do you see best way moving forward? Building bridges? Creating parallel systems? Integrating new things
within existing ones? I know these are the type of things
that keep me awake at night often. [LAUGH] Like even just thinking
about their own future. About so many ways. The institution. And education. As we discussed education is
a common ground that we are kinda discussing right now but,
what do you think is the way forward? >> First of all, remember what I said
about how I do things, I start off, I work hard on things I have no clue,
I don't understand, I do not understand how it comes together,
how it fits together. But after a few years, I finally managed
to piece it together and make it coherent, but right now I'm in the incoherent
stage so I can't answer you. But the issues that you raised you said,
how do we put together and you listed a bunch of things,
that's absolutely the right questions. And to me, the answer is, it can't come
from people like you and me, it has to come from the very people, that we're
talking about that are normally left out. We want them to be a major
part of this conversation and that's what we will be doing in the next
phase of our education program. As I said, we've collected a steering
committee of 16 people we have about 400 or 450 people who volunteered to help. The steering committee on October 8,
we scheduled it, we'll finished the first important phase of its work,
structuring what we will be doing. And then we do the next phase which is
bringing in many of these volunteers to help us start the next phase,
which probably will last at least a year. I'm trying to put this together so
I don't know what the answer will be but, that's the process that we're going to
be using to go towards that answer. And this process we're designers, right? And one of the things you do in design
is you test, you try, you build and you observe that if it's not
working right you modify it. And so being wrong is good because being
wrong is how you learn, so I expect that whatever we put together won't quite be it
and we'll be modifying it as we go forth. >> Yeah, one thing is for
sure you, me, and others like us we do have
quite a lot of implicit bias. We have spent a large part of our
lives figuring out this system and developing solutions for this system. And now when the system is changed
it's really not up to us to figure these things out. But one thing we can do, though, we can
pave the road for the next generation. And we can create a better platform for
people and we can start these conversations and we can share some of our
>> Yeah. >> Things that we have created so far as a systems infrastructure to
help elevate a new conversation. >> Here's the most important
principle that guides me, the principle is, I don't know the answer. >> It's a good principle [LAUGH]. I actually always prefer for us to work on projects that
we've never done before, in industry that we never worked before. And we call this a naive innovation. We just venture in, like explorers,
on uncharted territories, we're learning as we go. And often as a result, we come up
with things that the people within those industry would
not have come up with. Simply because we don't carry
that implicit bias in that way. Except I do want some interpreters and
to lead us, and those would be the young
people that come from all the other areas and points of view. How that will get integrated together,
I do not know. And by the way, one of the philosophies
that we've always stated about our project is, if we have, say, two completely
conflicting ways of approaching design education, we don't have
to bring them together. What we can do is we can say, okay,
we have two conflicting views. So we're going to do our best
job to present this view and then to present that view. And we'll let the design schools, and the
students of the future, decide which one, design schools will they want to follow or
maybe how they would borrow from each. And the students can decide which
school they wish to go, which mode? >> Absolutely. >> That's one of the answers we will give. Is that we don't have to reconcile
some conflicts and approaches. We make it possible that you can
that the schools can choose and therefore the students can choose. >> Absolutely one thing that I strongly
believe, and it took me many years to come to that conclusion, despite my initial
thoughts, was that there is no such thing as a universal design education and
it shouldn't be. And the design education, design
generally is a reflection of society of each of the societies where it exists. So the way that maybe I have set up
certain policies and certain ways of leading the school based in Cincinnati
based on the history of the city, the positioning,
the geopolitical circumstances is not exactly how I will lad the school
in a different part of the world. In fact I was an advisor, via Stanford,
to a private university in India. And they were very interested in
setting up a new design program and an incubator and so on. And they were like very
effectuated by the d.School. And the combination was, how can we
build a copy of the d.School in India? I said, well, you're wrong. This school wouldn't
even work in the Midwest, in the Midwest of America,
let alone India. There are lots of different circumstances
that enable certain things to happen, the position of certain
companies where they are, and certain schools where they
are based on all kinds of things. And it's a wrong way to try to copy. The idea is to find what works
in India and maybe not even for entire India, maybe in this part of India. Where this school that they wanna set up. What works for them based on
what they have to work with and what the problems are, is what kind
of school which should happen. And when I've been to India before,
I have seen this huge stark contrast in terms of the type of work that designers,
the design students do there compared to what design
students do, let's say New Zealand. And it was like day and night,
the approaches that they have, the problems that they deal with,
the solutions that they're providing, the context in which they
work is completely different. And this is what I think even now as we
move forward with this type of design with new design education, we need to look at the decentralized model
of design education, not just universal, but what that means
>> [CROSSTALK] >> By the way, India is a really good testbed,
because if you go to Hyderabad or Bangalore, the high tech sections, you can't distinguish them from anything
in Western Europe or the United States. And but
you go sometimes just 100 meters away and suddenly it's a completely different
in India, the impoverished people, the people who have very different
skills and needs and desires. And how do we accommodate all of those? I mean, it's interesting I was
when I last was in Bangalore, I made sure that my host took me out
to the everyday parts of the city. And we met this family and
the woman she made statues and she made them out of straws,
drinking straws they'd thrown away. And she made these beautiful statues and
they were wonderful. And she sold them, and
that's how they earned a living. And I said, wow,
how did you learn these skills? And the answer is she watched YouTube. >> [LAUGH]
>> YouTube is one of the world's best educational institutions,
except that the stuff is not curated. But anything you wanna learn, you can
find a YouTube video that's wonderful. The problem is you can find
like 1000 YouTube videos, not all of which are wonderful. So it's difficult to find the right one. But it's an amazing resource. But actually, I think almost every country
probably has a wide variety of needs and therefore different kinds of
educational requirements. India may be an extreme case because
you have extremely well educated, intelligent people, and you have
people with no education whatsoever. But they're very,
they're just as intelligent. >> Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you taking even
more time with me than we originally planned for our talk. >> It's always a pleasure to talk to you. [MUSIC]
