 in tech, that's us. 20 years ago, I started a design firm called Doberman, and I think that there's been happening a lot throughout these 20 years. I remember when we started, it was kind of, you know, the fight for the user when we were trying to build these new products in the late 90s. And then design has evolved, and it's, no, in my opinion, come pretty far. I now see a lot of companies bringing in designer as an executive or on the board, and it's even being valued to the point where we actually decided that we should run our own design-driven investment company, Doberman Forward. So a lot of happened when it comes to design, I think, the last 20 years. What is your take on that? What is the role of design in your current companies, Carlyn? Right, so maybe I'll leave it to Backtrack, because a lot of people have been asking me at Slush, what is it that a product designer does? And how it looks like for me at SandCloud is basically to work on a daily basis with product managers and engineers to build new features and new product. And there's two things, basically, that the design does at SandCloud. I would say one thing is to bring clarity on what we're building and why we're building it, because everybody has an idea of what we should build next. But that idea is actually very different from one person to another. And business people have a lot of decks with a lot of bullet points. And product managers try to write specs on what a feature should do and what KPIs it should hit and things like that. But truly, it's when people see the design and can interact with the design, even if it's at the low fidelity level, that everybody has a common understanding of what this is that we're building and that the conversation can move forward on whether or not this is a strategic move for the company to keep investing into that idea. So bringing clarity is one thing. And the second thing that the design does is to get initial feedback on early ideas, because it's one of the mistakes that I see startups do at the early stages, that the first time they would actually show their product to the public or that they will talk to their users is when they have a fully developed product. And then they just hope that this is going to go the way that it was planned. But really, you can save yourself a lot of guesswork by having a product designer in your team very early on that would actually prototype ideas, show it to users, and iterate based on that. So those two. So how early is that? How early do you want them to be part of the product? I would say really part of the very first team that would build the very first product. As early as that. I would say this is really the two things, the two superpowers that a product designer can give you at an early stage. Yes. I think that I always come back to Bill Buxton's definition of a role of design. You've got two roles. One is designing the thing, right? But there's also designing the right thing. And I think the designing the right thing part is where there's been growth in the value and impact of designers. And also, I would say, ethnographers, user researchers, in close coupling with designers, to quickly illustrate kind of the possibilities of what could work in a marketplace or in a context as quickly as possible so that you're reducing the sort of error in the sort of product market fit as early as possible. And I think that happens a lot in large companies. It happens a lot in companies which are oriented around hardware because there's much longer time frames and much more capital risk. But I think it also is starting to happen a lot more in companies that are designing services, smaller companies. And certainly it's something, if I try and think back to my sort of started experience, it was something that the whole team was involved in. But there was a designer as part of the founders team doing that. And that was kind of part of the advantage. We saw it as an advantage in what we were doing to actually be able to quickly illustrate what was going to work as Caroline's saying. And what is your particular role for design in your company right now? Right now. That's a very good question. I hope no one I work with is watching. I mean, I work in research. So I typically work and I work in AI research that feeds a lot of the hardware work at Google. So I am working in those hardware time frames. So I am working on things which are maybe three to five years time. So you then come in super, super early to Caroline's point. Well, you're also using design and user research to actually understand where you should be pointing the whole machine to sort of investments in chip technology and things like that. Because you get into this dance, I think, of a cycle of understanding what the capabilities could be in three to five years time from a technological perspective and trying to think about where you're actually trying to get to then. So you're illustrating conceptually where you might be going to, but then you're also sort of creating a list of requirements for other design projects in that intervening time. And that's generally what, because we don't work on any one product area at Google. We work across lots of different ones. We're sort of creating those cooperations and collaborations across Google as well as a result. Yeah. So I would argue that designers now have a pretty good seat at the table. And if you agree, what would you then expect from your fellow designers if they now have a little bit more power than maybe before? Caroline? Yes, absolutely. I would say product designers have a seat at the table. And that comes from the fact that they are in a very interesting position of being involved in the two stages of product development. First, at the start, it's a conception of what we should actually build. And then in the implementation of how we should build it and how we should feel for users, because basically that's what the user is going to have in the end. I think that what we can expect from this very strategic position is that, as Matt said, designers would be the most value when they are also involved into the problem definition and not just into the solution itself. So when they really work collaboratively with business, engineer, and product to figure out what the specs will be, really, like fleshing out the specs themselves, so then at the end, you truly have a product that would actually meet the business need and the user need. I've never really thought of having a seat at the table, because I usually stood up drawing something on a whiteboard. But I think that, yeah, we have more influence than we used to have, but I think we also kind of need to realize that when you're working with people who are very invested in an insight that they are getting funding in or they're trying to build a company around a vision of, if you are not a founder, you're often seen as challenging that insight that they've had. And I think that's one of the things that perhaps traditionally designers have difficulty like managing that in a way, they almost need to act a little bit more like perhaps the investors or the VCs are working with those founders to actually challenge them in constructive ways or bring them evidence to help them move along that insight that they've had, which obviously is like one of the burning things that's actually making that company possible. So trying not to do that in opposition, I think is a skill that designers are learning now as they sort of get closer to either fostering or supporting or challenging those insights of if they are not a founder. But if you are the designer who made most interaction with the end user and you had a lot of empathy for that end user and you want to challenge the core idea or the founder because you feel that that's part of your job, shouldn't you do it or is it more like how you frame it? You may also be guessing because you don't have any users yet. So it depends how early on you are or how far out your envisioned state is. Effectively, you're all speculating on some kind of future success. But I think designers have a tool set to be able to speculate quite concretely and sort of make, as Carolyn was saying, like these boundary objects that can depersonalize the discussion and really sort of accelerate the discussion. I think that's kind of like partly what the value of having design at the table or the whiteboard early on brings, is that concretization to make kind of the speculative futures real. And understandable, and yes, yes. Don't ask me a question. No, no, no, no. So Carolyn, how in more ways can designers bring more value more than just making it more concrete and understandable for everyone around the table or around the whiteboard? What more can designers do? Yeah, I think it goes back to the same idea. So yesterday in the opening speech, they were talking about how ownership is part of entrepreneurship. I mean, it's the same matter. I actually feel that if designers owns more of the problem definition, not just the solution definition, that's where they bring the most value. Yeah. It's interesting because I think that word ownership is used a lot and you're sort of like made to feel guilty if you don't have distance. But I think like one of the things that you have or you employ in design or any sort of creative endeavor, engineering, whatever it is, some kind of critical distance or reflection on what you're doing. And because people are so bound up in this ownership of what they're quite rightly to have the passion to take the risks to do what they're doing, often there isn't that ability to have that reflection or critique from different viewpoints, which is where sort of your advisors and your investors often come in. But I think actually the designer is used to that from their education, their schooling, their community. And they have, you know, they can give kind of concrete, overusing the word concrete, so they can introduce ways into the company culture early where you can get that critique happening in a way that isn't damaging, doesn't slow things down. In fact, it accelerates things, increases the connective tissue to your potential user bases and markets. But that creates friction. And do you think that there is openness to that friction and those other perspectives? Well, if you think about, you know, if you went to design college, art college, you know, it's all about friction. It's all about critique. You know, it's very robust. Yeah, but I mean, within the organization. Yeah, so maybe they throw you out. But it's very managed in those situations. You know, you know, you know that you're going into it. You want, you're looking for it. You want that constructive critique. So I think there's actually a sort of cultural, you know, a cultural contribution that design, you know, design education history, pedagogy, community for the last 100 years can actually bring into kind of, kind of founder culture, if you like, or startup culture. Yeah, I think ultimately, everybody is working in the same direction. You will not have a very successful business if you don't build a product that users will love to use. So everything thinks about the, everybody thinks about the user. The engineer think about it. The business people think about it. The designer think about it. What design really allows is that to bring like, abstract ideas into something concrete to really move the conversation way faster instead of having a lot of conversation and misunderstanding that don't need to happen. Yeah, so is bringing those different perspectives and adding those skills into a tech company is a little bit also about taking risk, I guess. Do you think that designers do really challenge and, you know, dare to have that risk of failure? Are they doing it enough or should they do it more? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I suppose risk is basically uncertainty in the outcome, right, and it's kind of part of the game if you're working for a backup, venture backed up company, right? So everybody's there for that risk to some extent. And in terms of design, what that risk means is that you're really trying to build something innovative. That means that you can't really look at what others are doing and just copy that because you're trying to go beyond that. You're trying to build something new that hasn't been done before. Now, however, design does try to limit risk in terms of time and investment of money into an idea that is probably unlikely to be successful. And we do so by following a process, by building quick prototype, talking to user, doing user research and iterating on those prototype based on user testing. So that would be how design just like tried to balance the two things out. But ultimately, I think it all comes down to trust from the business that design can really lead you to the next level in terms of building good product that users will love to use. And that trust really has to come from the top, for sure. Yeah, I think that design is employed in big companies, small companies, very much of a conversation around UX designers and user-centered design is very much around de-risking what you're doing. But I think there's another component which we used to talk a lot about back at Berg, which was invention and sort of getting to moments of invention through really understanding the materials that you're working with and doing that in through the processes, the tools of design, the craft of design was how we attacked it. And so I think that kind of, again, usually in smaller companies, startups, the insight of the invention is something which sort of comes to the table. It's the reason why you're doing it, right? But often in larger companies, that's some years before that happened. So they're looking to innovate, they're looking to renew their company through invention. And so one of the things that I think designers can do is actually understand a company materially. They can understand it through the literal materials that are being produced or processed by that company or sold by that company. But they can also understand the sort of techniques and culture of that company in a sort of material way and illustrate and communicate that back and again reflect that back to the decision makers. And I think that's one of the things where it isn't about risk, it is about invention and that is something where I think it's, that's generally the role of consultancy companies or agencies often, but then you have like the issues of actually landing that and integrating that. It's less, it tends to happen less perhaps internally in smaller and medium companies particularly. But it's something which is, it's part of the muscle group that designers have and I guess they shouldn't just kind of sell themselves on hey, we're gonna reduce the risk by making everything user centered and prototyping, et cetera. There's also a massive role for invention and insight through what they do. Yeah, can I add on the human centered? So I spent this spring making a documentary on the frontiers of design. You can see it on frontiersfilm.com if you want to. And one of the person that I interviewed is a NAB Jane and she was questioning a little bit about this human centered perspective that she wanted it to kind of enlarge it a little bit and she said what about ecology and the world and the planet and do you think that maybe we have been too human centered and that there could be a conflict in that? Do you wanna go for this one? I would say before we go to like human centered or anthropocentric design which is I think an abs thing. I think there is, I strongly believe that there is a move from strictly single, kind of like user centered processes to something which considers more of a system or a network of the actors involved in your service, particularly as kind of like service design techniques become much more prevalent in what we do rather than just kind of like UI or UX design. So I think the broadening is, just to keep it simple, we keep it to humans for now, maybe because we have a lot of human problems but actually broadening from looking just at the user and how you're satisfying that individual to looking broader than an individual and considering your product or service in a much larger networked context and the sort of externalities and the impacts of how all of those things play out, including the business model you've chosen, the people who might be kind of bad actors working within your network or working with your tools, that's something which is urgent, particularly in certain contexts and that's something which I think people who had just been looking very much at these kind of like single user stories of rapidly starting to have to engage with and lots of wisdom from the services on community over the last 50 years to sort of bring into what we're doing. Yeah, so is there any particular great leaps around design that you're especially excited about right now, anything in technology or behaviors or service design or anything that excites you? Berlin? I think I've observed two things of actually different magnitude, let's say. The first thing would be the new waves of like design tools coming out there and they seem to get a lot of attention from VC and investment and I'm thinking of like Envision or Framer was announcing you around and so forth, but ultimately what that tells me is that it's a little bit of a bet in the future that design will remain really as a centric role into building new product and the other thing is like you're mentioning there seems to be a move away from the screen so we hear about service design, we hear about voice design, we hear about this Amazon dash button that just allows you to reorder some product that you need at the moment that you need and that basically say that product design is all about solving problems and it's kind of regardless of a henny owl and currently we still associate design with visual design and an app or some screens and things like that but I think product design can really expand and go like way beyond that and that would be very exciting to see what the role of a product design will become. I mean, I actually met a student behind here and she said to me, I actually don't know, there are so many roles, UI, UX, service design, I don't voice what should I apply and I think it's like a little bit of a confusing world right now maybe and maybe we should just shift and say let's solve problems using design. Exactly, that's what product design does. It's pretty much irrelevant on which platform that will be. Who knows, our tools will change. Is it anything that excites you a lot right now? Oh, lots, but I can't tell you. Well, I mean- There's not that many people here. I mean, obviously I work in sort of AI related fields, I'm very excited by the work I do generally, which is sort of based around moving AI from happening in large data centers in a sort of more centralized architecture to happening more at the edge on device AI, things that are under your control, don't need the network to function, et cetera, et cetera. And also very exciting, I mean, a lot of stuff from the 90s is not just music, but computer science theory from the 90s is sort of coming back. So I'm very interested in the move, as you said, away from screens per se and apps to something which is more like the sort of agent-based computing theories which were sort of, you know, I remember reading about back in the early 90s. Now- So you will now only hire designers to study- You were my age, yeah, no. Yeah, so that's an old-aid pension scheme. But no, I mean, seriously, you know, a lot of the stuff that was written about in terms of theory back then is now becoming practical reality in terms of the technology being feasible. So that's at least really interesting to me. It sort of feels like there's another shift coming over the next kind of 18 months, 36 months around kind of like the ways we engage with complex systems. I don't think it's gonna necessarily be the kind of, you know, the assistant model, but it's gonna be something which is very much kind of like along the lines of the agent computing vision of the 1990s coming back. Maybe it's wishful thinking from an old guy, but there we go. I find it exciting, at least. So lastly, with all this, and if we now have a new, you know, white board in a new boardroom or wherever we have more power, or we actually, you know, we are inventing the things as designers or we are the problem solvers, that also comes with a lot of responsibility. Is the design community quipped around responsibility? What are you thinking about that thing? Yeah, I think the fair things that always come to mind to designers like ethical question, which is like, are we doing the right thing? Is this not like wrong? But I think this question is fairly easy to figure out if I am actually putting the user into a situation that obviously they didn't want to end up in. But I would actually put the idea of responsibility a little bit even further, because it's all well and fine to say, move fast and break more things and things like that, but I feel that in the process, you may have actually heard someone, because when someone is using your product service to achieve a goal, let's say it can be to lose more weight or to save more money or things like that, and they fail while using your product. You've actually heard that person. You've actually made them less likely to succeed in the future. So it's not only a neutral event. So I think it really is important to try to succeed in the creation of building solution for users to improve their life, because when someone shows your platform to share their music or their writing or their photography or whatever craft they are making and they don't get any success of any type, you're making them less likely to pursue this as a career, let's say for example. And there you are. You've actually influenced somebody's dreams, somebody's life to some extent, and that is something to kind of keep in mind. Thank you. We're actually out of time, but what I want to say to all of you, don't you want to have this type of conversations in each and every product development room in your companies? The only thing I can encourage you is to bring more designers to the whiteboard and make them responsible for the problem solving for the inventions and taking that other perspective and making things concrete. Thank you so much for being here. And thank you, Matt and Caroline. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you.