 Thank you all for for being in this room with me and thank you in advance for your attention There is nothing quite like it to stand in a room with people like yourself Who are giving your attention? It's a powerful feeling. I want to share a bit of that Could could I ask for a small gesture? Could you turn to those besides you and around you and tell each other that you're happy that they're here with you as well Could you go and do that? Thank you? I am a graphic designer Soros and the shirt. I graduated before computers ruled the world Yes, there was once that time. I currently live and work in Singapore And I am a principal designer for a user experience company called foolproof So I use insights and creativity that are evidence-based All aimed to improve the lives of people So as I was saying, I enjoy Receiving the attention as an author and a speaker that is that is very powerful. There is also another Feeling that is very powerful that I've got very lucky to enjoy quite a bit as a designer And it's the opposite it comes from paying attention not just Getting attention and my concern is that you exp practitioners We're not always paying attention I'll elaborate So the job that people like you and I are doing looks a bit like this Yeah, it's not very exciting is it but this but this is the user having the experience that we have designed This is it We tend to Focus on this person like ask any of us here in the room Who is our most important stakeholder and we will do the fully answer of the user, right? We put their needs at the center of our decision-making And then this is what you get we take that term experience Quite lightly. In fact, I feel that we're a bit lazy about that when something is linear and rational and transactional when you can complete a journey successfully you say that has been great experience design But what does that term experience actually entail? Well experiences for one for us humans. They are physical and the most obvious part of our experience are our own bodies and What we sense with them what we hear what we smell what we touch It's just that it happens We are only aware of our bodies when they are in distress when they are in pain All other times we're kind of shutting that thing out like right now. How does your body feel right now? We will have difficulty answering that We're not experiencing at the moment Experiences are also emotional Those are your feelings now in our culture of Rational and logic Emotions get undervalued In fact, if I get emotional right now, you will probably tell me to calm down Right. We it gets undervalued but emotions play a very important role in Understanding what it is that we value and what it is that we avoid in the environments that we're in Emotions we tend to think are things that overwhelm us. They just happen and then we react we have no control We are passive Passively experiencing emotions actually that's only half true While it is true that you cannot stop the feelings. There is an actual construct going on. I'll explain I Am aware I'm in India and traffic kind of moves in its own reality here I need to ask you for your trust that in Singapore where I live This is the street in front of my condo. This is a high-risk crossing This is a high-risk crossing and I'll explain to you why Drivers do not see the crossing. They do not see the traffic light. They blow red lights all the time I've seen people be cut off by cars. I've had to hold my own son back Because cars fail to stop. I know this. I anticipate this Which means that every time I approach this crossing, which is at least twice a day my body without much Conscious knowledge is preparing for an event. I Get cortisol in my system stress hormone. I get adrenaline. This is a visceral Preparation that my body is doing Because I'm anticipating something but there's something else that will be constructed as well an Emotion is being prepared anger Likely don't have to explain that it's kind of bad for you when someone driving a couple of tons of metal hits you right Now What you need to take in in consideration is that your body does not like to waste energy It wants to preserve energy and your brain is a spectacular energy hog All those stories that you have in your head. That's costing energy the less you do it the better for your body It's in that framing. You must understand emotion. You see you are not emotionally reacting to events You are emotionally preparing for the events that you might think will happen. Your emotions are pre-constructed I Need the purpose the clarity and the drive of an emotion right now in this situation to help me think to help me react to help me live a little longer and And so that preparation of visceral and emotional preparation in Anticipation of events that we predict may happen. That is something that we do at various points in our day When things are predictable There is no surprise Everything is known If I can predict it, I will know what is expected of me and what I can expect of other things and And what we do as UX practitioners is we go look for that we look for patterns of predictability and then we can illicit feelings of familiarity of trust ease of use and By extension, we start designing affordances and layouts and interactions that hold that prediction and that pattern as well said differently our job is to To standardize Routineize and make experiences repeatable It's life on autopilot we switch off I do not need you to invest time and energy in emotions because I've prescribed them for you That reminded me of this quote here if we practitioners and force patterns we remove the need of our users to Question to think there's no surprise. There's no need. I have prescribed the emotion for you. I have dictated the experience Not much fun now or is it? We tend to not pay attention to that We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us someone in Tinder. I hope no one's working here at tinder Someone at tinder decided that you could swipe away people you do not want to interact with and you have zero accountability visibility no No repercussions. I can order at any time of the day my food. I don't have to say please. I don't have to say thank you That's the society we help create Now for humans change is the most natural thing we can deal with It's easy to allow change to happen and then we UXers We do our best to avoid change We routine eyes We do not like change and hence we're surprised that our society is a verse of change Has that been by design or by circumstances? I will leave that with you, but people are The biggest design problem you will ever face and there is no pattern for solving them Because people are messy Do not expect to teach them or show them how to live think and work by patterns only because patterns Patterns do not care Patterns don't care. They're not even human centric. They're not user centric Because how can a methodology that is all about the user and all about the human Come up with things like rampant data manipulation Exploiting human psychology with addictive features Dark UI patterns. Well, the answer is it can't Which means only one thing we're not actually designing in a human-centered way So here's the fact of life when you're a human It also happens to be the terms of conditions for when you're a UX practitioner These patterns that we use and these tools that we then apply in the technology that comes into play They're not only changing what we do. They are changing who we are as a species and We're about to experience more change in the next 10 years than in the previous 100 So I am concerned that this acceleration is just going to erode away our humanity. I Want our discipline to remain human. I want it to be meaningfully human and That requires us to change a few things Because if we want to keep our profession human There is a need for us to question our processes So bear with me. I'm going to introduce to you Four principles of counterintuitivity. They're very subjective. They're my own But they've helped me to design more meaningfully human The first one that I'll share with you So in this in this age of AI and data and tech What will make for a design act and what will make it human? Well, perhaps it's by doing more which is seemingly unnecessary About two years ago, we all witnessed something that was completely unpredictable out of our control the Thailand cave rescue So in those three weeks, we saw countless acts that were selfish That were that were about people Giving up what they controlled. I'm thinking of those rice farmers that gave up their paddy So the floodwater could be pumped out of the cave. They lost their income in the makeshift town That was built at the foot of the of the cave People voluntarily without pay without ask without compensation would wash your clothes do your dishes scrub the toilets That all happened Now some acts were indeed a bit unnecessary. I'm thinking Elon Musk submarine But all of them were meaningfully human All of them are deemed unnecessary. We're in a profession where we only act on what we think is necessary But we can also choose to do more than that We want to be in control of our process, but we can also let that go and see what happens It's a great way to counter Predictability and it's a great way to flush out the quality of your decisions and designs I'll share a story about that Years ago. I was asked to rebrand a merging company. We were gonna Merge two very different cultures engineers and creative types And this is gonna be a big company about 10,000 people This needed a new brand and for that we Decided that the new brand color was gonna be yellow if there are print designers in the room the Pantone was P135 and As part of the rollout for this we thought it'd be a great idea if we gave all the employees a yellow rubber duck Now as we approached that launch period We decided last minute to just not do that We had no real idea how this would play out. We felt out of control. This didn't really feel necessary It seems to me now that looking back This was the beginning of the end for that company this merger never happened the companies never became one Now was that because we didn't give them yellow rubber ducks. No but But this mentality of kill the ducks it permeated everything else Because both the brand and ourselves were only fixated on doing what was necessary and not doing what was meaningful You may not always realize it, but when you cut the unnecessary You sometimes cut the meaningful. So my advice to you Do not kill your rubber ducks Here's rock and roll saving the world again But it's reminding you that it is always a good time to learn again to give again Give more attention to what you think is not necessary Learn more about what you thought was obvious It's often the depth of that thing that contains immense meaning New ideas and new inspirations I'll move on to my my second principle. This is based on studies that That show how you feel about the work that you do very much depends on the relationships You have with your colleagues and with your clients and What are relationships other than a series of micro? Interactions and there are dozens of these every day and each has a potential to be more meaningful. I Was reading this Gallup survey where? 27% of bosses said they are convinced that employees are inspired and engaged among themselves That same survey said only 4% of those employees agreed Now we might do better if we just look within the boundaries of our creative industry But it makes you wonder if these are the people that we design for What are our chances of doing that meaningfully? when We have no sense of belonging. We feel lonely When we feel lonely in a place, we are not engaged when we are not engaged we do not have creativity and We undermine our our chances of designing something that has meaning So the chance here the opportunity here for design leaders is to facilitate Creatively different and I believe that as design leaders what we can do to facilitate creatively different is create Moments of affinity. It's a magnificent design challenge if you do it right instead of a Forced loyalty you get a playful attachment at will I'll illustrate There was a time where I ran my own design studio in Shanghai small firm about 12 people and At one point in time I decided that at any given Friday in a quarter maybe once or twice a quarter I would do a tradition called Freaky Friday And on Freaky Friday, you were required to wear a mask all day All day. You didn't take it off our lunch either We did that we did our work wearing masks like this when clients came even our biggest clients We asked them to put on a mask and Join us. We would leave our office on Friday full of energy full of alignment full of affinity Do not underestimate the power of a ridiculous mask Now again, I'm not advocating that you all go and buy a mask But here's what I learned Hierarchy kills attachment And masks erase the hierarchy Masks allow you to use the disguise of the false to show something true about yourself Showing something true about yourself creates a moment of affinity Even for people that you work with or people that you work for because your ideas your designs They are manifestations of those relationships that you have with these people a Lack of connection and it seems to be the red the thin red line in our conference But a lack of connection is costing you. It's costing your colleagues. It's costing your user If you do not connect with those around you while doing this profession It is a matter of time before any sense of belonging disappears and you are going to look for a change in your circumstances But it's not easy Because these relationships with our colleagues and our clients they They are under stress They've suffered disappointments Betrayals and we need to now make that more meaningful for one another again and to do that Requires a big step. It requires us to dare and be a little ugly, which is the third principle I would like to unpack We have come to believe that If we express who we are authentically We show our beautiful self the nice part about us Now I would argue that if you are showing who you authentically are You will show your ugly side. I find this ironic, right? We know that that The differentiator between what is automated and and and what is prescribed is being authentic So what have we done? We've created the patterns for authenticity and you can see that now in social media There's this whole wave of visual mimicry of people expressing what they think they should express in order to show their true self It's recontextualizing authenticity to something superficial This is the collateral we pay For documenting our lives online the way we think it should be documented and with the attention algorithms always watching That humanizing presence of struggle and fear and doubt and failure. It's disappearing from our authenticity That is wrong So we had this company wanting our help to transform them Digitally, which means actually a cultural change And on from the outside looking in this this was an awesome looking company, right? Their products are amazing their people Talented their offices look like urban hipster resorts. This was a place that looked really attractive but they were not comfortable in their skin and One of the exercises we did was we had everyone in the company write down All the obstacles for better performance and there were dozens of them. We stuck them on boards We moved the boards into the largest conference room they had and we renamed the room the ugly room and the ugly room was open for anyone to come and See this was a social mirror of how the company felt about itself It surfaced all the tension up and everyone could see it visitors partners suppliers employees Celebrate your ugly room Those are your obstacles to better performance embrace them to be authentic is to dare to be a little ugly It's not adhering to a pattern. It's adhering to who you are regardless of the pattern And again, it is not easy because most of us are thinking about The questioning or even the ridicule we might receive from being ourselves on purpose all the time every time But I invite you to try Because if you dare to be yourself you will automatically invite someone else To be themselves and be comfortable in their skins as well, which is another moment of affinity It requires the last step the last principle. I'll share with you today It requires you to accept that you are incomplete and unfinished This is not a race. There is no finish line Perhaps some of you are familiar with them the music The musical genre called Fado. This is a Portuguese music a Portuguese music that cannot be replicated by machines Why is that well? Fado is Unmistakably human in its imperfection. This is a musical genre that does not have drums The singer determines the beat which in music is a really bad idea. It makes the beat Volatile irregular fragile, but it also makes the music melancholic beautiful Human these small mistakes these small imperfections actually bring out that creativity You might recognize the brand at play here. This is KitKat Staging very theatrically what their core slogan is about Beautiful piece of advertising now we read business books where it's heralded how flawless and Perfect delivery and efficiency are the key metrics to success Why is that? Why as an industry and a society are we so obsessed with only celebrating what is success What we think is success. I mean to a point. It's warranted, but it's also very limiting What do we learn from something that has proven everything? In this age What we can consider is to add more friction to humanize your experience I'm obviously not recommending this in financial transactions where you want to security and the predictability of what you're doing But those are like low Emotional engagements you have with a brand or a product Brands and products usually want something else. They want to hire emotional engagement and being human is increasingly that differentiator for you to connect with people if We are to see your product and a brand as one of us you product and brands needs to become more human So I'm not here to clarify. I'm not here to tell you that Patterns and data and technology is bad is the enemy. I do not believe that they're not the enemy of creativity but I do believe that it's people like us that have the opportunity to question and do things differently and uncover more possibility and it's those of us those among us here today that Remove their blind spots and remove their self-imposed limitations that have a chance of doing that and Working counter-intuitively to what you sense you should do is a great way to to unpack that so what I'm asking you all to consider is that it is our own tendency to look for patterns to look for iterative success That is funneling our society down a very narrow path Towards a future of predictability where we only look for operational efficiency Now consider that we did not invent the electric light by the continuous improvement of candles We have a bigger role We have a deeper calling as the tech design As all these fields are converging our role is to question these possibilities to open up that space To have us move to a culture of possibilities So let's let's do that for you X. Let's save you X from being overly rationalized from being overly predictable That starts with you and me Now we may think that what can I do? I'm just one person Well change starts with one person's it Individuals doing this together. Don't do nothing just because you can't do everything If it's not people like us, we are soon gonna live in societies that have no appreciation for the unnecessary The authentic and the incomplete So embrace this Do the unnecessary create moments of affinity be authentically ugly Remain incomplete. These are not only The characteristics of designing more humanly those are inherent human characteristics by themselves These are also the qualities of what we can call home and As we disrupt and are being disrupted The least we could do is to make sure that we still feel at home in our profession So that it is our talent that then can allow others to experience that feeling as well You are a wonderful audience. Thank you so much