 First of all, I'm absolutely delighted to be here. I had no idea what a brilliant conference this is. I'm just extraordinary. I'm very annoyed I have to leave it tomorrow, but I've already got such a great vibe for the different types of people who are here and the conversations I'm hearing. So thank you very much, whoever invited me, probably Sophie. I arrived from London. I'm only going to mention the Olympics once. Okay, hope I get away with it. I'm going to talk to you about some very practical things in many ways. As you'll see, my job is to kind of try and create the future now in quite a practical way and design what these future digital experiences are going to be like. So as Sophie said, I once had a design consultancy with a young student from Newcastle called Jonathan Ive, who's clearly much more famous and wealthy than me now. And he still rings me up every six months and tells me he's had tea with Bono or somebody. Thanks, John. But initially as a product designer, I was designing things like Apple portable computers and a very over-expensive Hi-Fi. And I was head of design at Samsung in Europe where we were creating very physical things that were increasingly using technology. I then got a fetish for working with people who had square logos. Seemed to like that quite a lot. And it was at Orange that I started becoming, I think it was a mistake. I don't think they realized I wasn't really a user interface designer, but I started to meet technology. And the first product I was given at Orange actually when I joined was this wonderful phone that had an internet browser open system to allow applications to be developed. Email, text, you know, sound familiar. And this was about 10 years ago. The first thing I noticed was it was impossible to use. It took me, I refused to read the manual and it took me two weeks to actually make a phone call on it properly. It was meant to be about the web. The screen was tiny. It was cluttered with little text and it was all about business, business speak. It was ugly. It was just really ugly. And the keypad was really difficult to use. You couldn't see what was on the keys. I realized there was a problem with this technology. We could do amazing things with it, but if it wasn't well designed, if it wasn't designed with an empathy for the people who'd actually use it, it was useless. And this was a very troubling thing. So I also found out at Orange that they had a fantastic brand. And as many brands, they're very, very good at communicating their core DNA. And, you know, they could describe that this phone had email in the palm of my hand. That was a lovely description, but converting it to reality was somewhat different. And whether it was email or many other wonderful applications that Orange and France Telecom developed, sorry if there's anybody from Orange or France Telecom here, it generally followed that. I was asked or told, here is an amazing piece of technology we have developed which will help people do things we confidently predict. They always wanted to do and now they'll do it all the time. We've made all the important decisions, worked at how to work, chosen the suppliers and developers and built a fully working prototype at great expense. Now you've got two weeks to design it or we will be late and it will be your fault, my fault. Thanks guys, that's a great brief. And I realized when they said design, you know, actually the design had already happened. I wasn't doing the design, I was putting the logo on or something and playing with the font. And I realized there was a real big problem here with the definition of design in technology. And to be honest, it's only got a little bit better. But why do I say design is important because people's perception of design is usually, certainly is in the UK and maybe here that the physical, it's about beauty and here's one of Jonathan Ives' loveliest pieces of work. And so it's something to do with making something beautiful. Design can be very contentious. There's the one mention of the Olympics right there. This logo was very, very unpopular when it was first launched. Everybody hated it, couldn't see any symbolism in it. You know, as the event itself has gone on, it's become deeply loved. And so people's reactions to pieces of design can be very emotional and they change. Information design, a little bit on the lines of some of Sophie's examples. The signage at Dusseldorf Airport was so bad people didn't know how to get out when the fire happened and lots of people died creating clear, wonderful signage. We can understand why design is relevant and appropriate to that. And then of course we meet designers who tend to be rather difficult, egotistical people who insist on the world being cast in their vision like Philip Stark will sprinkle his magic dust on a train or an orange juicer or whatever it might be. You know, and just trust me, I'll make it beautiful. I'm not sure that's the kind of design I agree with or encourage or I'm really talking about here. But back to my friend Jonathan and his marvelous evangelist leader, of course. When you do combine design and technology and I do think this is a marvelous combination of design and technology, all the same functionality that I had on my terrible orange phone suddenly becomes usable, suddenly becomes joyous, almost magical. And you go from internet, mobile internet usage to day before the iPhone was launched was 18% of mobile users who could access the internet did it once a month. The day after 98% of iPhone users access the internet every day. And of course we know now that it's just constantly being accessed. So they unlocked a complete market, a complete success story, a complete business success story by a successful combination of design and technology. And of course what we also need to understand it's not just an object. An object is just a little part of an ecosystem of a total customer experience. And I increasingly find myself designing not just the piece of technology but the whole journey that gets to it or it is part of more often. So with Apple we have apps, we have iTunes services of course and we have shops, shops that do not behave like shops behave normally. They are completely different experiences so that design, thinking totally changed. So what on earth am I doing at Cisco who make these things? They make things in racks that blink and engineers get very excited when they see them. It's a little worrying. And why on earth would I take my wonderful second best designer in the world after Jonathan Ives' skills to a company like Cisco? Well the interesting thing about Cisco is they develop the applications that sit on that technology. For those of you who don't know Cisco makes the kind of nuts and bolts of the internet. So it's not very sexy but on the other hand what you can do with the internet when it's fast and accessible and all those things suddenly you have amazing video conferencing. When I take people into this telepresence video conferencing people have a life-changing experience. There is a legend, I think possibly untrue that when George Bush Jr met John Chambers, our CEO at the end of the conversation over telepresence he tried to shake hands with him. I'm sure it's just a joke. But he had a point and I actually do think we should stick fake hands on these so that you can do that and they should tremble a bit when you touch them. But it's interesting that we take that at the application of technology and then we go imply it to medical, talk to a doctor, talk to a lawyer or buy something complicated like a mobile phone or a holiday by having a video conference or buy a kitchen and the one on the left is a live thing in the US where you can go buy a kitchen and speak to a kitchen designer of every type of style you might want which is very difficult to do in a physical store. So you begin to see how designing a physical space actually becomes a more interesting experience than the live one. Cisco also dream, and I like this dream they had and they put in telepresence screens in a village in Italy and a village in China and eventually as people walked past these screens they worked out that they were seeing people the other side of the world. And you can imagine that's a very uplifting thing to do with technology. It was all fixed, it was a fake for the advert but the idea was good. So I like the fact they at least had a good idea. So technology we really believe and I certainly believe it's a very transformational tool. You never quite know what it's gonna do but it will certainly transform. And ultimately it's about unlocking capability of us, of everybody. And of course companies spend a huge amount of money. The investment in technology is staggering sometimes luckily for my bonus. But technology, how can you make that technology, that investment, how can you make it relevant, desirable, accessible, unusable? Because if you don't it's clearly ridiculous and a waste of money and time. So what we try and do, what I do is I work with the customers of Cisco we try and create those transformative technology experiences but we design them. So when Caesars Palace in Las Vegas wanted to do something interesting with technology I obviously volunteered for the job and went out there and they wanted, very often our clients simply have some technology and they just want to use it. They wanted to use RFID tags and they had tried it in their topless bars in Las Vegas. So that when you're at the pool, the topless pool I hadn't been there. I didn't do the user research, okay. Then you could pay for your drinks with a little bracelet, sounds a great idea. After a week they found out that nobody was using it and the reality was that the waitresses were telling the punters, the customers that it didn't work because with the tags they didn't get any tips. When it was cash they were getting $500 bills well not down their front because they didn't have one on but down their pants or something and suddenly their whole life changed by this bit of technology and that hadn't been predicted, hadn't been understood and I love it when technology fails for that reason but that's why we need to understand how people really are. What we did end up doing in Caesars Palace was convert all their basically their posters, sites into displays. We put on RFID and your room key had an RFID sticker so it knew where your room was. You could touch it in, find out where your room was, where you wanted to go. It also knew because Caesars Palace is very clever and cunning in understanding their customers. They would know whether you were on a bachelor's party stag night I mean or whether you were here on your 50th wedding anniversary and advised you to go to the Pussycat Club or whatever it might be or not. Make sure they get that right. So they were able to give a very personalized digital experience that normally they lost contact with their customers the minute they actually arrived at their resort. So we were using technology to keep that relationship going. Another concept we created was a very clear vision. Wouldn't it be great if you had a cafe with that kind of digital video, high quality video and you could talk to somebody at the side of the world in a cafe and young people could talk to somebody in another part of the world and try and overcome their prejudices and just become more educated with their points of view. So Cisco were sure this was a fantastic idea. As a test, they put in their lovely telepresence screens into an art college central, St. Martin's, my old art college in London where the students immediately complained of surveillance. They felt they were being watched. Cisco were very upset about this. No, no, no, it's just about communication. And then the students said, but this is ugly. This is designed for a business. So they hid it with wood. So there was just a hole for the screen itself. And then they configured a whole load of games where people on each side of the two screens that were put in had to learn something about the people on the other side. And every time they did that, they would receive a free drink. So it was a game designed to slowly collapse as they went on learning more and more about each other. But also they found that using it for themes like Valentine's Day was great. You suddenly got a reason to communicate and then the technology worked, but simply putting the technology into the space failed completely. I love that again. So we could then design, in the more conventional sense, a beautiful and flexible installation that allowed you to be very private or allowed you to be quite public and have a group of people talking to somebody in, I don't know, Libya or South America. Obama caused this Kansas to Cairo because you can have groups of people in a controlled way talking and learning about each other. Very often we look at new technology that looks very exciting. This is a magic mirror. You can put, you stand in front of this thing. It is gesture. It's the world's first sensible use of gesture, Sophie. Because it's like a fashion mirror, you have to be away from it. And you wave at it and different clothes come through. The whole store's clothes, if you like. You find something you want or you can compile an outfit and then you try it on and it puts it on you. It locates all your shoulders and you can see yourself in this dress. But it was a horrendous piece of design. It was unusable. And ergonomically, it did all the things that Sophie warned us about, gesture. You did get tired and it was very difficult to use. So we brought in design teams. We created a generic version and learned from that. It's a very learning experience to design technology. And then eventually found a live client where we perfected that user interface that was absolutely critical. Now this technology costs a lot of money. Everyone was paying a lot of money. We could not get a budget for design. We eventually found a very small budget for design. If we hadn't had a design budget, this whole technology would have failed. This pilot would have failed. And I'm constantly amazed how people will go so far and then forget to make sure that things are actually designed because that will be the thing that makes a difference. I'm glad to say six weeks of this, and it was a huge success. They sold a lot more dresses. They're desperate to have it back. Few. A couple of other examples, it's slightly different. We're very interested in how technology, the role of technology in our aging process, we are all, I'm sure, familiar that certainly right across the globe, society is aging. What do we do with people when they live longer? How do we help us look after ourselves more? We worked with a town in Holland to understand how technology could help us age better. And the first thing I did was Google all the people in that town who are over a certain age because nobody in the team in this town, Elmira in Holland, had actually got in their mind the people they were designing their services, designing this technology for. And we quickly found a bit of a dope fiend up there in the hat, a guy next to him, that's a dating agency. He's well into his seventies, but he's still hot. The guy in the middle is laughing, not dying. And some people using technology with the Wii. There's some great stuff there. All class, some people protesting. And it made them realize, and you might not think this is design, but it's about starting with people, starting with the people who will use your services. And this was very important to them. So important that they completely change their town planning process. And they now have personas of people, their own citizens in their offices on the walls to remind them who they're actually designing for. In this case, we just put some video screens again in. We got people singing. We got people who would go to a community hall and slightly younger, more able people would go to the brand new art center that none of the old people could get to. And they had one crazy conductor who taught both choirs in the same place and they started singing to each other then they started singing to people the other side of the world. And it became a very emotional thing actually. And people who had been bedridden or house-ridden for months got out and engaged again in their community. So sometimes the benefits, I liked, there was an earlier talk this morning, they talked about how do you measure something? And I've always been asked, how do you measure things? It was difficult to measure this, but there was a lot of happiness. And people were doing things differently. You could see that was happening. We went on with the aging project to look at wisdom because as you get older, you obviously have life experience. We have knowledge, we have skills. Amazingly, people in the UK and all over Europe retiring at 50, 55 with a huge amount of knowledge and they just go and play golf or something. Trying to harness that knowledge, trying to mentor younger people, mentor older people, use the web as a platform for knowledge exchange was something we were very interested in. However, when we asked people what did they know, they would write longhand. They don't know that they have to write a word and then put a comma after it so that we can tag it easily. So we have to learn a whole new way of tagging knowledge so that we can identify what wisdom they have. But we wanted to use the power of technology to create that kind of cloud picture of who people really are, not just a teacher or a policeman. We want to, and there's so many examples of people in older age using the web, but in a very static way. We wanted to use video because you just see that guy's face. You know that a young person's just told him what they did last night and you see that emotional response and this is why video mentoring is so powerful and why on the top right, it helps young kids going into violence in Chicago where they share the testimony of older kids who've been through their violent gang warfare. They don't go and follow that route themselves. So we have prototyped this. We are finding wisdom, sharing wisdom, connecting wisdom. And by taking this very user-centered approach, working with a bunch of people to understand what their wisdom is and then build that into the technology, I think we're going to create something really exciting. So what's different about what I'm saying here? Why is this any different to anything? There are a few main principles. One is let's understand what the real experience is. My wife is a teacher. She buys lots of books, real books, not e-books as we saw just now. She hasn't actually read my book, but I encourage you to, which you can get on a wonderful site like Amazon, which is not very pretty, but incredibly effective and brilliantly designed in the way that it works and the reference. We then have a wonderful logistics system that can deliver those books to your door, which is fantastic. And then they arrive packaged up and safe, absolutely wonderful, and they meet the Victorian portal that is the letterbox on my front door. And then I go to the post office on Saturday and join the other 500 people trying to get my bloody books. That's a real experience. Lots of bits of brilliance in between, whether it's the logistics or the website or whatever, but the whole experience, nobody takes responsibility for, and it's usually broken. And anybody in the business with a brand that understands that succeeds, but most people don't, they don't understand. So we begin to have workarounds and new innovations like little local grocery stores will take your internet collections for you or your returns that you don't have to stay on all day waiting for the delivery, et cetera, et cetera. And technology is a powerful force in that, but understanding the right amount of technology is something we often get wrong. So my house is full of digital clocks. Why? Because every chip has a clock in it. So let's give people a digital clock. And then the hour changes at the end of the summer or the beginning of summer. And I have to go around spending that hour that I've gained or lost changing the bloody clocks. And then I go to my mother-in-laws and do hers as well. Thank you technology so much for all those damn clocks. And I think it's a silly example, but it noise the hell out to me just because we can, we do. That's the wrong thing. We need to understand what on earth for. So many devices not interconnected even with the same manufacturer. No strategic vision, we just throw plastic and PCBs at us and plunk them in our living room. We need to have a much more strategic and sustainable view of devices. So my poor old dad, who's not alcoholic, he just happens to have a beer. He's puzzled by TV that he has, now he has to navigate around TV. You know, this is complicated. He can't see it anymore. And his laptop, he now has a Mac, so it's got easier. And his Wi-Fi system, you know, I'm the one that spends, I'm his IT department, of course. You know, I'm the one spending my weekends on the call centers trying to work out how these things should work. So what goes wrong here? Why has that happened? And what can we do about it? And the obvious thing people always say, well, let's ask people what they want, how they want it to be. That isn't always the right, easy solution. Phillips gloriously in the 80s designed this wonderful radio and asked people, did they want it in very bright colors or did they want it just black and techy? So they did the right thing. They had a focus group and everyone said, we love the bright colors. We will definitely buy that one. And as a gift for taking part, they're allowed to take these radios away. And they all took the black one, the one they said they didn't want because suddenly they had to make a decision that was, hang on, I've got to take this home. I've got to put it on my kitchen table. My partner's going to look at it and say, what did you get that for? You know, so suddenly the reality of the decision and that design is about prototyping that real experience, not just having market research come up and say, do you want this or do you want this? Because you never have enough reality. My favorite, favorite story at the wonderful Heathrow Terminal 5, I'm being ironic, is it's a big project. You have to get these things right. You know, you have big foresight. So they understood that people were getting older too and that older people would be traveling a lot more. So they followed them around the airport to see what needs they had to factor into the design of the airport, found that they all were going to the toilet a lot. So they thought, right, okay, we've underestimated their bladder weakness. We need to double the numbers of toilets. And when they got, one of the researchers strangely decided to go into the toilet. And when they went into the toilet, following these poor old people, I hope they didn't spot them, they then saw that they were just standing around in the toilet listening to the announcements because it was the only place in the airport they could hear. It wasn't about toilets at all. It was about a better sound system and places where you could have silence and lots of displays so that your confidence, you get your plan. Now, I think we have to get into the toilets of life if we understand. Because when you do, there is innovation right there. There's nuggets of possibility. So that's what we need to do. We all think we know what simple is. Engineers think they know what simple is. This wonderful example, gladly, is not there anymore, was an old London tube ticket machine where I can see the engineer saying, if we had one button for every station, that would just be the simplest thing. So there's 350 buttons there. With typeface, this poor guy hasn't got a hope. Now, how would design have solved that? I think if the guy had printed it out at full size, as it came out of the plotter, he would have thought, that's not the best idea I've had today. I'll now go back and have another idea. Which is an important point. Because I think we have to work with users and increasingly the message of design in technology is working with users, collaborating, co-creating. These are all the buzzwords. They're important things. Interestingly, politicians are doing it a lot as well. But it's not just about that. It's about having real pictures. I'm working, I have a great job. I'm working for Manhattan Transport Authority at the moment. We're designing what the customer journey on Manhattan trains is going to be like. And having good pictures and personas again of people is really, really important. So they have it in their head. But having more than one idea is really important as well. And very often, technical people, chief executives, politicians only have one idea. And then they just protect it. And try and fight everyone off. Design school, if you don't have five ideas in your presentation, you fail. You've got to have one idea, then another, then another. And even if your first idea was really good, your other four ideas will build on it and find other things that will support it. I think every child, every one of us, should be taught how to have more than one idea. Because it's exciting and you go on a journey and you always end up with something better. So that's, I think, where design makes a difference. And I'm very nearly finished. Because finally, I think we can design the future. Somebody today said they couldn't see the future. I think we can design it. This is my favorite product of all time. It's a washing machine. Yep. It's a washing machine where you put your clothes in the bucket and you leave them there for a week. And the natural process of the plants, the water goes through the washing. And during that week, your clothes become clean through a completely natural process. And everyone says, oh, don't be ridiculous. That's a nice idea. But I couldn't put up with a week. But the company that did this also did the research on the length of time your garments are in their laundry basket. And the average length of time is one week. So actually from you putting them on the floor and then getting them clean is exactly the same. Now what I love about this is it's not real. It's a bit of plastic and a story around it with a bit of fake grass on it. Because it's saying if you want an environmentally sustainable future, we might have to think about this. We might have to wear dirtier shirts and put up with our smelliness. But that means we use less detergents. It's a dialogue with our future. It says, how about this? We're going to make you believe this is real. You can experience the future. And I think that's a very powerful tool that design can bring to all of us. Finally, when we have done all these things and we have created wonderful technology, there's one last bit that can go wrong. And an Apple, sorry, Microsoft very famously did a video a few years ago about what would happen to the beautiful Apple packaging that they created around iPhone. If Microsoft had done it, 25 marketing people would have come up with their input on it. And they would have been incentivized to say, ah, this is not expressively human. We must add the price rebates. So you get this just horrendous iPod, 2,040 dollar rebate. This is an empty box, a nightmare of packaging because they've been incentivized. I think managers should be incentivized to shut up and hold the vision. I've never seen it, but once you've got it all right, hold it, defend it, then you can defend it. When you've had more than one idea and you've used users and you've done the whole stuff, now we deliver it. That's what Apple do that no one else does. Design is not an option. We do it all the time. We just do it unconsciously or poorly. In this digital world where we interact with each other, the objects around us and they with each other, we've got to design technology that's usable, delightful and successful and not just cross our fingers and hope for the best because, as this SIFTables tells me from MIT, every single thing around us will be connected, be talking to itself, it'll be a screen, all the things we've been hearing about. So let's make sure that that is simple, not complex and helpful, not a hindrance. Thanks very much for your time. I'm sorry if I went over.