 All right. I think we're about to get started. I think by now you should see that we're going to do some creative activities. So we have some Play-Doh. We're also going to do a quick drawing activity. And so I think we have some paper and some pens. I'm so excited to be here. It's been a decade since I've been to Bangalore at the CRH Tour with Microsoft. Research Labs at Bangalore. And it's just incredible to see how much things have changed. I'm very blessed to be able to come back and see all this. And I literally, I was blessed yesterday at the SHIVA. I went on a tour. And I'm not sure if they're supposed to have physical contact with it. One foot blessed. I'm going to knock my nose. And so it's been a really kind of wake up and amazing experience to me. So I did design at Walmart, which is kind of interesting because, you know, as a designer growing up, I never really thought about having a light wool someday. Please let me work at Walmart. You know, Walmart and design are kind of an oxymoron in some ways. It's like, does Walmart even care about design? And I've always found myself working at Microsoft. It's been a lot of pleasure to be in cultures where design has definitely changed. So I have a couple hundred designers at Walmart. We actually have a team here in Bangalore. And we are working on all of the new ways. And everything changed about two years ago. Walmart bought this company called Jet.com. So Jet was this really interesting, scrappy startup in New Jersey at Walmart's sales. They did some really interesting things around pricing. For example, if you promised not to return a product when you were ordering online, they'd give you some money off. If you used your debit card for the purchase, and you didn't have to pay the credit card for a percent transaction fees, they would give you a percent back. And so Walmart, who cares a lot about both prices, saw Jet and said, we bought Jet for $3 billion. Which is pretty amazing because Jet actually wasn't thinking about it. And they brought on Jet's CEO, CEO of Walmart. He brought on new generation. And so I wanted to talk a little bit today about some future ideas, much in line with what you probably wouldn't know, to let you know some of the things a couple of steps are designed to be taken. Our first step was doing something called two-day free shipping, which for those of you that have shops on Amazon and elsewhere, this is just kind of obvious, right? Like, I want to get my stuff fast. We launched this about a year ago, and this was how many of you guys have shopped at Walmart? So when you're at Walmart.com, you don't have to get it. We then did this thing where if you're ordering something online, then the US 94% of the US population is less than 15 miles from a Walmart somewhere. So if you're ordering something online, and if that is in stock at your local Walmart, we'll actually give you money to go to the store to pick it up. Because it's really expensive to get that last mile of delivery to your house. So this doubled the number of people that started connecting with our physical stores didn't shop. And then the third thing we did is my favorite. Does anyone know what these things are? These are Amazon dash buttons. And so if you're an Amazon client member, and in this case, you can craft back your new cheese, you want to store craft back your new cheese, you just press the button, it basically sends a little message over the Wi-Fi, re-orders that item. Now our family can look at this connected. We have about 12 of these buttons throughout our house, and our kids, and we request these buttons all the time. But we actually ended up as a family doing a hack. Instead of ordering stuff from Amazon, we would press any one of our buttons. It now opens up this page at Walmart. So this is actually my personal eCree order page. It was amazing when I took this screenshot. On this day, I've got three kids, all with super curly hair. My daughter is constantly clogging the sink. And so there was a perfect prediction of what I needed that week, because I get drained clogging. And in this design, it's so easy for our family to use this. Now these are all pretty amazing things that really changed business in the backhand, our stock price level. But it's really just in many, many ways, I feel that there's so much more to do beyond just a better shop. So our design team created this website to design for the better, which is our design team. And this is what I want to talk about. I'm excited about all the stuff I showed you, but I'm more excited about where we're going next. Walmart's corporate vision is for people to save money. And the design team, we started to ask this question about design. Walmart is the world's largest grocer. And when you look particularly in the U.S. at the way that Americans eat, it's pretty horrible. We actually, Jamie Oliver gives this TED talk about food and about kids. And he's, you know, it was shocking to me to learn that the next generation of Americans will likely have a shorter lifespan than their parents, particularly because of poor food choices, obesity, genitive heart failure. These things are preventable from good nutrition. So the question for Walmart's design team is when we're the world's largest grocer, what is our role in potentially helping households keep the same budget or maybe even save more money, but still increase the nutritional quality of their food and having less process? These are fascinating questions that designers don't normally ask. Now let me give you one example of what we're starting to do. We have a pizza knife every quarter. We bring in 20 to 30 families that rely on Walmart.com to shop. And they bring in their favorite magazine and they sit down at a table and they create a collage answering the question, what does living better mean to you? They then walk us through their hopes and their dreams as a family and they identify a part of their dreams that are broken. And then we say, well, let's use some magical thinking. What if anything is possible? Let's imagine that that could be awesome. And we bring in some improv coaches who together with these families and us we're kind of role-playing the future together. Our design team then takes all of these murals, these hopes and dreams of ordinary families that rely on Walmart and starts to think about, well, how can we change the way that we create tools and software to help these families live better? So here's just one example that we launched last week, which is, you know, it's kind of worn the fashion side, but I thought I'd show it to you because it's an interesting step. One of the families we met with, Rodriguez family, in their magazine that they brought in, they created this collage and they said, there's such a disconnect between the life that we want to live and they were talking about their home, a very simple home. And I see these magazine pictures and it just feels unattainable. Like, I don't know how to I don't know how to create the kind of cozy, welcoming, stylish space that I want. So we actually ended up redesigning completely our home decor direction of Walmart. And this is from People Magazine. They're like, wait, design double take. Walmart, is that you? These rooms look awesome. This is the same prices of Walmart products that we used to sell before. Now what we've done is we've actually put them together so that there's an Amazon ad. We'll just skip it. And so what we started to do is actually in our website created this whole new area about shopping by style. And actually showing how you can bring together different products that have a similar kind of design taste. Because a lot of our Walmart shoppers they have a hard time doing that for themselves. So this is launched last week. It's a very simple humble step towards this idea of making ordinary people's hopes and dreams a little more accessible. But even this, I'm not super excited about. This is great. It's a good step but I think there's way more. I wanted to share with you today much like what Alan talked about. I think there's three things that all of us can work on to create solutions and designs to help society, to help people for any household or any worker that we're designing for help. So I'm going to tell you at the front. It's these three things. Being fearless, human fueled and being fast. I know human fueled is a little awkward but I wanted that third F. So if you guys have another suggestion for something that's talking about being focused on people and let's start with the first one, being fearless. Be fearless right now. So what I want you to do is grab a piece of paper and something to draw with. Raise your hand if you don't have a piece of paper or something to draw with and we'll get you something. Okay. So what I want you to do is bug up with some person right next to you. Give them a little fist bump. Just introduce yourself, tell them your name. Alright, everybody's got somebody. Everyone should have a pair. Then raise your hand if you still need a paper and we'll be back here. Okay, everybody all set? Okay, so you now have a buddy. What I want you to do is in 60 seconds in one minute, I want you to draw them. On your mark, get set, go. Halfway done. 30 seconds left for the final 10 seconds. Put your finishing touches on that. Okay, awesome. Now share your drawing with the person who it's of. Okay. Now hold these up for me. I'm going to take a panoramic photo. I want to just capture this moment. It's just so awesome. You guys ready? You have to stay nice and still. Start over here. Go across. These are beautiful. Excellent. And done. Okay. So what you guys have just done actually is a creativity experiment that was done by Bob McKim from Stanford University. This is Bob McKim on the left here. Now Bob McKim did this activity with all kinds of folks. And every time he did this activity with adults, this is exactly some saris. Even when I'm taking this panoramic photo, I was saying like, I love this beautiful moment. And someone out here is like, yeah, sure. These really suck. Right? So I like walked through and I asked you guys to do this. I was just listening to some of the comments. I think I heard someone saying like, I apologize in advance. Like, I haven't even started drawing, but I know this is going to suck. And you guys are like creative, innovative professionals. And this is, every time you do this with adults, this is exactly what happens. Now, when Bob McKim did this activity with children, particularly elementary school kids or middle school and high school, there's a very different reaction. Any guesses about how kids react to this activity? Yeah, excited. Awesome. Kids actually are pretty amazing. They're not really excited about it, nor are they afraid of it. They just do it. And any of you guys who have kids or have worked with kids, what happens when you put out a sheet of paper they do? They just draw. They just draw. And anyone who's a parent knows that kids just draw even if there isn't paper there. I mean, furniture, walls, you know. And Bob McKim did this activity to prove that human beings are innately creative. That we have an innate capability of making, of drawing, of expressing. And that somehow, it insults kind of the hormonal kind of strange years of middle school. We start to like care about the opposite sex or the same sex, and we start to fear the judgment of our peers. And then we start to have this reaction when we're asked to draw. And what Bob McKim said is that this is the challenge in design and innovation is developing creative confidence. It's to regain confidence in that ability. And there's actually a great book called Creative Confidence that was written by two Bob McKim's mentees. Their names are the Kelly Brothers. They founded IDEO. And Bob McKim, his work actually with the Kelly Brothers and Tim Brown and IDEO, the D-School started. So this kind of experiment and this thinking is the core of, and the beginning of the point of designing for a living better. You have to be fearless. And I think this ties really well with what we just heard Alan talk about of questioning assumptions and going back to not just the safe predictable things that we've done in the past. We have to have a mindset of just creating and not worrying about the judgment of our peers. The second thing is about being human fueled and this is where the Play-Doh comes in. I'm going to start getting a little bit of Play-Doh. This will be a good time to get started there. And raise your hand if you don't have Play-Doh. We've got a couple extra jars also. Okay, so the second thing is about being human fueled. And I have to say to start here we use the word user all the time in our profession. I probably heard it already six times today. And even the word UX right, the U stands for user. And there's only two industries that use the term user that I'm aware of. One is software development and the other one is the illicit drug industry. And it makes me feel that when we think about people user is such a small insignificant way to describe human beings. And I think what Alan talked about is that the ability puts designers in a place that recognize I don't care about you just when you're using my screen or using my software. I care about you and your goals. I care about you and your hopes and dreams. So actually I propose that we banish the word user of vocabulary. In fact, we changed our team's name from Walmart UX to Walmart Design because we want to have a different way of thinking about people. So let's talk about being human fueled. I have to tell you, this is a book that I gave me this book when I was about 20 years old. This is a book called Information Architects by Richard Saul Orman. Anybody know Richard Saul Orman? Yeah, a couple of you guys. So Richard was a trained architect who got really excited about the challenge of designers taking massively complex data sets and making them clear. He also, by the way, started the TED conferences. So if you wash a TED video, that's what Richard started, the whole technology entertainment design. And in his book Information Architects, he profiled the work of this guy, Clement Mock, who was an ex-Apple creative director, who started design agency in the 80s, late 80s, early 90s, embracing the complexity of massive information systems. So I ended up working for Clement at studio and he had this statement, which was the experience of the brand. And when Alan was talking about, we were at a stage where we had to invent new professions. They didn't exist. There wasn't training. We didn't have any tools. We actually took this title of experienced designer. So when I first joined Clement studio, I had this brand new business card. It was so proud of it. Dan Mikowski, experienced designer. I felt like a badass. I was like, I don't just design software. I design experiences. And then I was on this project for United Airlines, where I met these really weird people called design researchers. Anybody here a design researcher? Any of you guys do design research? Yeah. So design researchers are interesting because they're like studying the people that we're designing for. We did this method called paper prototyping, which I'd never seen before. Essentially we had this blank browser screen where these researchers had some travelers imagine what would be a personalized United.com homepage just for them. But I was kind of pissed off when I saw this. So I'm like, that's what I get paid $350 an hour to figure out. People don't know what they want. That's my job. This is the ego part, kind of beating out the humility part of my soul. And then in the next 18 months the insights that came from that week of research ended up solving some of the most complicated interaction problems that we had faced. I kind of, the humility part started to come out. I took out these crazy design researchers to lunch. And I said, what do you guys do? Where does this come from? And they introduced me to the world of design research, particularly Liz Sanders. Dr. Liz Sanders is my hero. She is the most provocative and grounded thinker in design. And I read one of her papers, which you can read at fakedools.org or fakedools.com I think is her site. And she said this, which I just had these business cards made. And I was like, what are you talking about? And I realized that this is how she defines experience. Experience is a personal feel, a personal thing that I have. It's a moment in time at the nexus of our memories from the past, dreams for the future. And that it is something that we can barely understand ourselves. Like how many of you guys use Facebook? All the older people. Everyone else is using Instagram and Snapchat. Okay, but Facebook has this feature where it shows you like three years ago this moment happened. I often have such a different perspective on my own moments that what Liz is saying is we can't design your experiences. Your moments are your own. But you can design four experiments. So that one small three letter word design, four experiments really changed my perspective as a designer. I think I got more hungry. And what Liz says is that there's only three ways to understand people. What they say they do and what they make. What people say is 90% of traditional design research today. Surveys, it's interviews, it's one-ones, focus groups, all of that. And over the last couple of decades this whole field has been revolutionized with the idea of you can actually observe what people do. I've got three teenagers in my home and I can tell you that what people say is often different than what they actually do. So seeing actual behavior gives you all these rich insights. Now there's this other area of seeing humans which is what people make. The reason why you have Play-Doh is because I want you guys to do a quick little activity that I hope you actually do with the people that you're working for to show you the kind of things that can come out by engaging people with their maker. This is an example of what Liz and her team would do. This is actually a project for Microsoft. This is a game controller for home PCUs. And Liz created this toolkit this play kit of little velcro buttons and forms and like any good sociology or anthropology class where you have a father and a son they're in their native habitats which is their home. And they are using this toolkit to kind of imagine ideal gaming experiences and when people are engaged in making new things happen. Now I won't go deep into the academics here you can read all about this at BakeTools.com but essentially you want to get to people's knowledge which is deep the latent or tacit knowledge you know the stuff that's on top the explicit or observable knowledge you can get through interviews and through observations about what people say and think what we really want to get to we want to get to that idea of a just peaceful society we want to think about what do people dream, what do they feel, what do they know and if you want to get to that stuff you have to do generative work this is a generative session we're about to do we're talking about human fuel we'll just be human centered don't use the word user think about people under deeper hopes and dreams and have them participate so when I was at Microsoft we were designing this thing anyone know what this is? This is the original Microsoft service right before it got on like you know kind of a workout diet became a small little tablet it was a big ass table we had no idea what we were doing no multi touch interfaces at the time so we brought people in and we created this make tool kit so this is a layer of acrylic and the idea here is that we could create prototypes that people could just draw on the surface of the surface and we could get this richness so we were looking at a mapping scenario and we had one participant and actually you can see this is literally the prototype we made from staples we were at Microsoft we were in the WIMP model this is the way that we were thinking about design and when we actually tested out this mapping application I remember there was this daughter mother who came in on different sides of the table and of course they couldn't read only one person could be the text because it's a 360 UI what does that say and so the daughter just grabbed one of these file folders cutting it up with scissors I was like I worked really hard on that last night to get this ready but they ended up creating this which was this fan which was brilliant it allowed this thing to be switched around it was 360 you could pull off one of these tabs you ended up creating this whole interface based on this one user's person's ability to kind of rethink things this was my first introduction at this stuff let me show you more of a recent one so I used to work at Motorola I like design research and we created this thing anyone know what this is this is the original Moto X did anyone own the Moto X yeah awesome you have a Moto X oh my gosh that's great what do you love most about your phone yeah you can personalize it so you can actually turn your phone on this is the phone that you get to design yourself now what else did you ever talk to your phone randomly just on its own so one of the things I should have coordinated this beforehand so one of the things that came out with the Moto X was the ability to actually talk to your phone without pressing any buttons so we're all familiar with this pattern now with Alexa and Siri the very first time that was created in kind of a modern era was with the X and the way that it came out was my design research team went into people's homes with this co-creation tool kit these were foam core boards wrapped in whiteboard material so you can see here on the chair lots of little squares of different sizes and we had households across the country in their homes role play the five year future and so this is Jenny in San Francisco she got home early every day from work and she just liked to turn on the TV and she liked the sound of just kind of something social happening before her boyfriend came home and she said you know sometimes I like don't know where the mode is it's like I would love to come in she actually had this dialogue with her TV it's like I want to come home I want my TV to say welcome home Jenny how was your day and it would say do you want to turn on the news like you always do and you know this was long before we've seen that actually happen so when we showed this pattern we saw this in households for different scenarios our engineering team said that they had this piece of silicon called the x8 listening chip it could actually do background processes really low power listen to a trigger word in our case it was okay moto hello moto we developed something called touchless control where you can say okay Google okay moto what time is it and what's so interesting about this is now this has become this really ubiquitous pattern but we were able to see it much earlier because we involved people in that process now we're going to do a quick making activity so get out your play-doh or whatever it is called what is the name of this stuff uvido and while you open up your uvido does anyone know what play-doh was called before it was played up it was actually it was called kutall kutall was a wall cleaner yeah at the turn of the century when you would heat your home with coal there'd be soot that would settle on your walls you'd need this putty to rub on your walls to clean off the soot and of course kutall wasn't really needed as we could have a glass and electric so the CEO of kutall they were about to go into bankruptcy the week that they were supposed to file bankruptcy they heard a story about a local school teacher who was taking kutall using it in classrooms with food coloring drops and using it as a model so the CEO went and he saw this teacher and he said that's what the purpose of kutall is and they launched play-doh and for 50 years it's been this really awesome symbol of creativity and play which is another good symbol of just see what people make with your products, with your services their workarounds, their hacks their things that they do that break what your intentions are are often the best use of your time okay so take your kutall what I want you to do for 60 seconds again it's a little bit harder to sculpt and draw I want you to design, to create to make a toothbrush you can do anything something that kind of deals with oral hygiene 60 seconds toothbrush mark, set, go 10 seconds left okay who wants to share their toothbrush okay so this is the sonic brush so essentially it cleans your teeth immediately all you have to do is pop it in your mouth awesome that's fantastic be honest how many of you actually bit into your play-doh anyone else? yeah that's great you know this is interesting because why do we take a toothbrush which is one planar surface and all this work to get it to four planar surfaces right molding and 3d printing would allow us to create something that's custom molded to you why not just chew a couple of times how many of you guys created some like round mouth guard like a thing yeah that just totally reshapes what a toothbrush should be who else had a toothbrush a structure of your so all that you need to do is plug it it is as natural as how your jaw is built and it takes care of the cleaning it takes care of the cooling it takes care of all the aroma that it can bring in so it's a multi-purpose that's great the cooling is key my mouth gets hot so much I think that's great yeah it's like a Roomba for your mouth you just set it in there and it does its thing alright who else had another cool it acts like a massager also along with cleaning your teeth you can keep on your face that's great so it's a multi-function it gets a massage and it helps with realisation as well what's the design for tomorrow's toothbrush which is to say that you could use it completely holistic tooth cleaning or if at all there is something which is typical particular or you just want to enjoy like a human finger you could still do that so like there is something which you could as well ponder while you were brushing and enjoying how your tooth are designed by God that's also fantastic alright maybe just one or two more things full of nanobots that's fantastic so like I love projects like this because it's like a toothbrush who needs a toothbrush right just like let me have something I can eat actually if that was flavoured well I bet I can get my kids to brush their teeth and they come and nanobots are going to do the rest of the work right that's great alright one more that's great it has backwards compatibility from the turn of the century yeah that's fantastic that's awesome okay so look we didn't have time to do a control activity but I guess the point of this is look at the kind of richness that comes from without any briefing 60 seconds using something like Play-Doh the kind of creativity that comes up if I had asked a different team to just write down their ideas and bullet points on a white board or on a notepad I think we would have kind of felt a very different quality when we get into that mode of baking we get into a different zone of possibilities so I want to please keep the Play-Doh and please use it on your next project now one quick example is IDEO actually was given this brief to create a toothbrush for children and about 15 years ago they were asked by Oral-B to create a toothbrush for kids now they went out and they observed kids brushing their teeth and this is kind of what they saw what do you think their design researchers would have noticed from this picture it's too long it's a big adult toothbrush does anyone notice the grip yeah like when we adults brush our teeth we have this really cool superpower where we use pads and tips of our fingers called manual dexterity and we are like ninjas with the toothbrush in every crevice kids don't have that superpower they do what's called the fat fists and when they brush their teeth they're limited really basically to their elbow and it's really hard for them to adjust so the IDEO research team noticed that they end up creating the squish grip which is the first ergonomically designed toothbrush handle for kids and now every place where you buy toothbrushes this is what you see this innovation has kind of changed the industry and I gave this talk at IDEO about how we can co-create how we can get people involved and there was a member of the original team from the Oral-B team and I said what do you think would have happened if you would have given kids Play-Doh to not just observe how they brush they said well we would have seen if I could borrow your toothbrush from the future there's like if you would have done their toothbrushes and talked about it and they would have set it down you would have seen an ergonomically designed toothbrush handle it's not that the kid would have said I need an ergonomically designed toothbrush handle to make it easier to grip my architecture it's a latent need that would have come out in their creation and not only would you have seen that but you would have seen Danobots and Lumbas and you would have seen UFOs and candy and all these other cool ideas in the process so that's the importance of making in the last couple of minutes I'm going to share the last piece which is about having a sense of urgency is really important and I think that this is compatible with slow thinking as well I think you can move fast with purpose and it's interesting when I worked at Google for a couple of years my boss was this military's advanced research projects agency it's arguably one of the most innovative technologies on the planet it's also kind of scary I knew there was a drone somewhere she was taking me out but what's interesting about DARPA is they only hire leaders for 24 months and then they kick them out no matter how good they are no matter how good their projects are and it forces them to be fast it forces them to work backwards and make those traditions real and so she wrote this paper called the Special Forces Model of Innovation on Harvard Business Review I encourage you guys to look at it this is a formula that you can apply to any team about how to innovate and it all starts with this question she gave a TED talk about which is what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail again this kind of idea of magical thinking what if everything was possible and my answer to that question was I want to make hardware more like software we all have the ability to change any app anytime and have this kind of personal software capability in our hand the hardware doesn't change and so she said okay Dan you only got 24 months what are you going to do to prove that that can work so week number one I ripped the back off a Motorola phone I talked to some of my engineering friends and they take this yo-yo board this is basically an Arduino compatible microcontroller that allows all of the capabilities of the phone to be exposed outside and then we said okay well we have to create a development kit now creating a software development kit is kind of easy you can download it at 3am in your pajamas a hardware development kit is a little bit harder because it's made out of atoms so this is our hardware development kit it is a Mercedes printer fan covered in 4000 linear feet of velcro because velcro lets base our it's awesome, velcro is amazing and you can stick stuff to it and you can change it anytime so it's a symbol of modular hardware and then we had laser cutters and 3d printers a couple hundred hackable phones and then a team of makers to learn about how do people want to use this kit and we drove 14,002 miles across the country in doing every other day a hackathon for a couple of days learning about what the next generation of engineers and designers want to make so in day one they would plaster this truck with their ideas about what they wanted to create you can kind of see it's everything from a digital watch to a hover car to a TARDIS various levels of functionality and feasibility but we would say choose one that you can build prototype of in a day and then our very first one a Caltech team took a work glove off the truck took some flex sensors and was able to translate American sign language into text messages so that people could communicate much more flexibly and it wasn't perfect, it wasn't error correct but it was working in a day and we saw this time and time again this is a portable eye diagnostics lab part of the world where you don't have access a lot of highly skilled doctors we saw these guys from MIT created this helmet that had an accelerometer in it and a dark night was riding home and actually stopped and the bikes behind didn't seem injured because the bikes ran into him so if he were to slow down he would have brake lights come on his helmet he also had this idea that if he turned his head he would start blinking like he's trying to turn but when he prototyped that it was kind of like really hard so they actually ended up creating this helmet which raised about a million dollars on the Kickstarter campaign to make this idea real and so we said if students in just a couple of days can do these awesome projects the world needs the platform so we launched Project Mora which was Google's modular phone for anybody to contribute to your hardware now it was just about a year ago that Google announced that they're shelving this project and I wandered the streets of Palo Alto aimlessly for like two nights out of depression but this idea never made it to reality but it was interesting because this whole idea actually did make it to reality there's another team at Motorola that took our first prototypes and they shipped a much more simple version of it so the Moto Z Moto Z2 these are likely to transform your phone to whatever you want it to do projector, camera, speaker actually this is my main phone so sometimes this idea of moving fast you're not going to get your goal but there are very valuable things you can get into the world that's okay so that's it I want to encourage all of you guys to in your own space think about those three elements how to be more fearless how to be cheap and fueled how to move really fast and create amazing things now what I did what I was told when I came here was bring a business card and I'm all out this is what my business card looks like if I were to give it out to you my title is design pirate because I like to move fast so here's the ways that you can contact me I would love to continue the dialogue I don't think we have time for questions but I'm going to be around throughout the day and I would love to hear from you so thank you so much it's so great to be back with you guys