 Hi, I'm Ali and this is The Service Design Show, episode 197. Hey there, brave change agent. Welcome back again to The Service Design Show, the show where we invite the brightest minds in our field and uncover what's truly needed to design great services that resonate with people, push businesses forward and honor our planet. I'm your host, Mark Fontaine. Our guest today, Ali Drout, has a seemingly magic superpower, a superpower that transforms the way you work and look at our world. What's that superpower? Ali can look into the future or should I say, futures. And you know what? In this episode, you'll learn how to obtain the superpower as well. Looking at Ali's career, her track record is nothing short of amazing. Amongst many things, she was the strategic foresight lead at Capital One, the group strategy director at AKQA. And now she's the head of innovation at design strategy at Nike. The red threat that connects all her past roles is that Ali has always been thinking about our future beyond the first and even the second horizon to uncover insights that can help us make smarter decisions today. Now, hold on, I hear you thinking, how can we think about the distant future when we can't even predict what's going to happen tomorrow? Well, without giving too much away, part of the secret is to imagine and explore not one future, but multiple futures. How? That's also the question I had for Ali. So in today's conversation, you're going to learn about the art of connecting seemingly random dots, how to continuously feed yourself with new things that might seem irrelevant at first, but a key to understanding the bigger picture and about a tool that helps you make the abstract future something that's tangible and which you can have a conversation around. Ali shares a lot of great insights in our conversation today. But if there's one thing you should not miss, it's the part where she explains why humans can't be the most important stakeholder in the design process and other better ways we can go about this. I'll be honest, I never dug very deep into strategic foresight as a discipline. But this conversation with Ali has definitely opened my eyes to its importance and potential and how it can help us serve these armed professionals to have more impact. So without any further ado, I invite you to join me for the conversation with Ali Drout and I'll catch you at the end for my closing reflections. Let the show begin. Welcome to the show Ali. Hi Mark, nice to be here. Nice to have you on. I'm very much looking forward to what we're going to chat about. But the first thing we always do here on the show is to ask for short introduction. I've read about you on LinkedIn and I've read in the prep email what you've been up to and that's a lot. But could you give us like a 30 second intro into what you do these days maybe? Sure. These days I am working at Nike as head of strategy for innovation and design. It's really fun. I love being at Nike. It's back in Portland where I'm from, which is a nice circular moment in my life. And previous to that I've been working in service design and design strategy and foresight and helping to build teams and practices across a number of either companies or agencies over the last 15 years. Yeah, I think you have some interesting connections with a few of the prior guests on the show. I do. I do. That's how we got together in the first place, which is nice. That's a snowball effect. You mentioned that you have some prior service design experience. The other question that we always ask at the start is do you recall the moment that you sort of first heard about service design? Do you have a service design epiphany light bulb moment? I don't know if I can call it an epiphany moment, but I do remember the first time that I was introduced to the term service design. This was about 2010, 2011. I was working at Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon. And one of my co-workers came in new hire and said, hey, I'm going to be starting service design. And I was like, I don't understand what that means. How do you design services? What does this look like? And this was a while ago as we were still defining what the whole practice meant. And it piqued my curiosity. And about, I guess, six years later or so, I was working at Capital One and Adaptive Path came into the Capital One family classic service design agency. And I had the pleasure of working with a bunch of those employees from Capital One and Adaptive Path and Learn Service Design from arguably some of the best in the business, although I'm open to being proved wrong on that. Although I'm not going to argue on that one. Interesting that you were at Ziba. Yeah. And one of the agencies, consultancies, that definitely was on my radar when we started the studio here back in 2007. Cool. Ali, we always have a lighting question around five questions or rather sentences for you to finish to get to know you as a person next to the professional. You haven't prepared for this. So it's the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready? Yeah. All right. If you could have a dinner with a one historic figure, who would it be? Rose of Parks. Noted. All right. Second question. The thing that always puts a smile on my face is? Running in the mud on a trail in the middle of the woods and coming out totally covered. Yeah. All right. Next one. If I had unlimited resources, I would? If I had unlimited resources, I would try to figure out how we can save this planet a little bit better. So I think there's some amazing, just longer answer. So tell me to be quiet whenever. But there's amazing startups happening around planting trees, trillion trees to help terraform essentially our planet. It's the only one we get. So I think that's what I would invest in. All right. Number four is my greatest fear is death. These are hard questions, Mark. I know. My greatest fear is that I don't have impact, I think, in this world. And the fifth and final one, you'll almost finish in line. Our world needs more. Our world needs more love, I think. Yeah. And on that note, we're going to try to transition into a conversation about design, more love from design for our world. In our prep chat, you mentioned that you feel we need to move beyond and I'm going to cheat and look at my notes beyond anthropocentric design. Please elaborate. What is that? And what do you mean? You know, similar to service design, I was introduced to this term anthropomorphic and anthropocentric through my master's degree, one of my professors there. And it really means designing around a human first and human only mentality. It's interesting because we're in a world where we've actually changed geologic eras into anthropomorphic anthropocentric. So it means it's all around humans and the impact that we have. I think it's really interesting because a lot of the ways that we teach design, design thinking, service design is around human centeredness. And my prompt is we need to get beyond human centeredness towards thinking around what's the impact towards nature? What's the impact towards technology? What are the other key stakeholders that we can design around to actually make more interesting, more sustainable and a bit different solutions to help us progress towards the future? Cool. Let's explore this topic much deeper. One thing that I know a few people say is, you know, this whole thing about moving beyond human centeredness, it's actually a bit weird because being human centered means that we're actually doing stuff that preserves our planet. Like you cannot be human centered if you're designing in a way that's harmful to the planet. So I'm curious to your distinction to this. Like do we need to move beyond human centeredness if the things that we are designing inherently, like can we design something that's not human centered that's bad for the planet? Does that make sense? Can we design something that's not human centered that's bad for the planet? Yeah, probably. Although I think a lot of the things that are bad for the planet right now start with human desire. You know, I think it's an interesting dichotomy. And that's the question here. Like was that truly human centered? Because if we're actually designing for human longevity, then we would be designing for the planet. I think that's the argument you're making. And I don't disagree with that at all. I think it's like the way of designing only for humans and without thinking about longevity, without thinking about anything other than like need in a moment or, you know, satiation of something immediately is where we get ourselves in trouble because we're not thinking about timeliness or timelessness, how we can exist as a species longer and so doing preserve the planet that we're inhabiting, right? So I don't think it's don't design for humans anymore. I think it's designed for humans, but realize that it's not just the immediacy of human need that we're designing for. Now, yes. And thank you for establishing that baseline. You work for huge for profit companies, commercial entities. How did you arrive at this point that you feel, hey, we need to, we need to address this, we need to talk more about this, we need to get better at this as a practice. Can you take us on a journey? How did you get here? Sure. I will first have to say, this is just my opinions on the podcast today. Please don't hold anyone else accountable just just Allie. But you know, I've led a number of teams over my career, business teams, creative teams, strategy teams. And I have to say that each team has a different perspective on how to get work done, how to design, how to create new opportunities, how to progress business. And I think all those are tools and a tool belt. So service design is a tool that I have in my tool belt foresight and strategic foresight. So really is a tool in my tool belt design thinking, you know, you can go on. But as I mentioned, you know, I was getting in my master's in design strategy and strategic foresight at California College of the Arts, which is an amazing school, I have to say, blending kind of business and creativity. And one of my professors brought up anthropomorphic design. And so it may be questioned. Okay, so what is if we're going to be designing for an anthropomorphic moment, you know, what's not anthropomorphic and what in our world has been designed that is not solely focused on humans. And that got me to this understanding or this questioning around what is technology? What do we create? How do we think about technology? And you have to think about a broadening of technology. So tech is not just silicone, right? It's the way that mycelium under underscore the entire forest and actually foster communication networks between trees. That's amazing. That's an incredible technology. But we don't necessarily call it technology. So in thinking through that, I started questioning what is true anthropomorphic design? What is not? And how do we start imagining a different mode of engagement if we're designing services across technologies for humans or nature or technology? So that was a bit of a tangent on why anthropomorphic. But how I got here in this kind of large organization, you know, I bounce back and forth between agencies and corporate and I learned something different every time I do that. So starting with Zeebo when we talked about earlier, I started thinking about and working on product design and service design as an account director. Actually, I was on the business side of this creative agency. We started thinking about and working on projects called lighthouse projects and lighthouse projects looked 15 years out in the future. We started looking at what potential futures could look like. But we did it through a design thinking lens. And I loved thinking that far out. I thought it was so interesting. And I wanted to add a little bit of process to that. You know, I thought maybe there's a different way of approaching the future than design thinking. And that led me to California College of Arts where I got a master's in strategic foresight and added some process and some rigor to that thinking about potential futures. And that's one thing I learned was it's not just one future, there's never just one future. There are many possibilities of a future that you can start designing for. And it's about looking at the scenarios and planning for what you want to happen, what you might want to avoid. So using that, I went into Capital One, started working in design strategy there, met up with the lovely people from Adaptive Path after that acquisition, worked on service design and helped scale that studio. And then transitioned into making a strategic foresight studio within Capital One and saying, okay, if we can use these tenants of service design and foresight and design thinking, what can that do to change the products or the services that we deliver to humans, right? So money is a very human thing. It's the most, it's really the network by which we live our lives right now. And so I couldn't think about a better way to apply service design, integration of humans and data, and that kind of thinking at a system level. And being in Silicon Valley in San Francisco at the time, it was naturally tech forward. That's when I started learning about this really interesting work that someone's doing with GMOs, transitioning the DNA of tobacco plants into data storage devices. So you could actually embed DNA into a tobacco plant, plant the seed, grow a plant, harvest a seed from the grown plant, and extract the same data sequence from the DNA. So you're talking about a database that is inherently natural. Fascinating, totally illegal to bring in the US because of GMOs. But you can imagine like a forest, a real forest that is data. It's like you have a library forest kind of thing. Really interesting work and totally changed the way I was thinking about how we design what we design for and how we can actually make a difference in the work that we do. I can keep going. Well, it's hard for me to even formulate a question around this. Maybe one thing that's on our mind is how do we, do you have some examples or some things that can help us to try to bring this into our day to day? So you're in the strategic foresight mindset all the time. You've seen the light. It comes very natural to you. How do we as beginners try to adopt this into our practice? I think it's more a mindset. There's a mindset and a practice to anything. You can have a mindset of service orientation or you can have a practice of service design. You can have a mindset of thinking about the future or you can have a strategic foresight practice and you can have them hand in hand. You can have them independently. So that's something I always think about. Same thing with just, you can do any application you can use that for. For strategic foresight, what I think is interesting at first is to just test yourself by getting out into the future a little bit. And this is where I'll really put on my nerd glasses. I am a huge sci-fi fan. I have a large library upstairs with lots of sci-fi and fantasy bugs. I talk about this all the time, but I really love reading science fiction because it gets you out of the known day-to-day world. It challenges the paradigms that you are operating within, helps you think a little bit differently, tends to help you think a little bit differently about the future also. So I would say you don't have to read sci-fi, but I think it helps. There are some great articles about why leaders should be reading sci-fi, because it helps you scenario plan a little better. And so I'm happy to share that link as a show note, if that's helpful. What I would say is read widely and read with abandon. I love this stat about Bucky Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, who fairly famously went into a magazine wall and would always choose the top left magazine, no matter what that magazine was. And it would just change content and intake. And that's something called associative fluency. You can take all these different inputs and you can start thinking about how they interact with one another. They can be current inputs, they can be speculative fiction, they can be fortune magazine, whatever it is. But starting to use those patterns and pattern finding to think about what the implications could look like is a really nice way to start testing how you think about the world, what services could interact, or how those trends could emerge and change into the future. So that's one thing I would say. Read some weird stuff and see how it feels. Yeah, okay. Makes sense. I can see that going, getting or feeding into the generalist mindset, the associative mindset, the the T shaped person who knows a lot about a little about a lot, just enough. But okay, reading sci-fi and expanding our vocabulary. What's the next thing if we want to get to the beyond human centeredness? If we want to get beyond human centeredness, and this is something I'm still working out. It's not something I have answers for. So how far have you got? Where are you? And what have you tried? What have I tried? I try thought experiments fairly often with my teams or with myself. I start creating scenarios or using prompts to create scenarios about potential different futures that we could design for. One person I was listening to about a month ago at an internal conference at Nike was really talking about weaving intelligences. And what I thought was so interesting about that was that he was taking this idea of different intelligences, whether they're natural or technology or human, and then weaving them together. And he was talking specifically about AI and human. And weaving them together, you actually get to a different output than you would if you were just using a human writing style or just chat GPT. By weaving those together and by making an interaction between the two, you get to a different place. And I think that's a fascinating way to say, okay, what easy tools do we have at our disposal, like chat GPT, or just walking out into nature and seeing what the interaction looks like amongst trees or animals or whatever it is, just getting out of our day to day human interaction can help us change the perspective that we have on what our impact is on the other intelligences in our world. So I know that's a really kind of ephemeral answer, but I do think there are simple easy ways for us to challenge our paradigms about what we do, how humans interact, and what the impacts are in the world around us. So in preparing for this, I have to admit, I use chat GPT. I was like, cool, how do we, what might an answer look like? How would that, how would that formulate a different response than I would as a human? And then help to add structure, although I changed it. And as I was telling you this morning, I went for a run, got a little muddy, was very wet, it was raining here. And you just think differently about how you engage in a city escape, right? If you're in it in a different way than you are in a car. So here's some small prompts in our worlds and in our lives, and whether or not you're a runner, whether or not you use chat GPT, there are little things we can do throughout our day to start changing the way that we think about how we engage and what other other intelligences are around us. Thank you for sharing these examples. And I can immediately see how just noticing, noticing more things around us and being less, might sound weird, but being less focused, being able to switch between I think somebody called the butterfly and the drill hammer, the jack hammer, that that helps. You, I think, mentioned also something about changing zoom levels. How does that work? And what do you do? Yeah, changing level of zooms. And zoom as in vocal height, I guess, not necessarily the technology we're on right now recording together. But I think changing levels of zoom when you're looking at, you know, the classic example is the forest for the trees, right? I actually think you have to start changing levels of zoom and how you're thinking about design challenges or impacts to the world. So you're thinking really high level thinking like, Hey, I want to solve regenerative farming, right? So like, that is a really big thing to start thinking about. You also need to start thinking about, okay, how is that applied on a very cellular level? What does that mean for a farmer in Central America? For instance, and like, what does that look like on their farm? So I think sometimes we get caught and I've seen this in the foresight world, I've seen this in corporate worlds, you know, we get caught at one level of zoom and we just say, okay, I'm going to solve like this Excel spreadsheet to get like this product into market by like next week or whatever. Or you're saying, Oh, I need to really figure out what the the sustainability metrics are for 2030 for our entire company, right? Those are really different levels of zoom, and they can impact one another. So I think drawing and trying to figure out and practice challenging oneself to say, Okay, what's the big idea we're going for? And how is it applied on a cellular level? It's something that's really hard to do, but it's important as we think through long term and talked a lot about like, timelessness or timeliness, right? We're thinking about a longevity of solution, you need to think about the big picture and a small picture simultaneously. So I tend to say it's like rapidly flipping between both the large landscape, like the huge forests that you see, and not forgetting to look at the beautiful structures of the leaves on each of those trees. So this is what makes that landscape so beautiful. And again, a little maybe poetic, but I think I know a lot of design professionals who are pretty good and enjoy this zoom level switching from being very detail oriented to seeing the entire system. At the same time, it can be extremely overwhelming and almost too much because you see all the possibilities and all the challenges at the same time. I'm curious, how do you handle that? Because when you do look at the forest, you're like, Wow, it's so immense. And then getting back to that cellular level can either feel, am I really making an impact here? Because I'm just working on this small tiny piece. So just curious, how do you balance this? It's a great question. I would like to imagine that I handle it elegantly, although I feel like sometimes, maybe not so much. I think for me, it's with a sense of inherent optimism. I'm a hugely optimistic person. I can see a big strategy and say, Okay, cool, what could this enable for us? There's a huge, a large idea. What will this enable us to do as a company? What will this enable us to do as a group of people? And that keeps me going. I guess I'm really excited. That's naturally where I go. My brain goes big picture because I like to think about systems of systems. I like to think about ecosystem design and what that looks like, what that means. And that's just naturally where my brain goes. Let's go big. Go big or go home kind of thing. That's where my brain goes. So it's actually more difficult for me to get down into the details. So I have to motivate myself more to say, Okay, big picture. What are the specifics in which it and how it can come to life? And to do that, I actually think about the impacts it can have on on individual humans or what that can achieve allows us to do in the short term and breaking it down makes it more tangible, which helps me connect to it as an individual human more or as an individual as a friend or as like a coworker is like, whatever it is, it helps me understand and have empathy towards those have to manage that kind of level of detail, which often is not in my role. So I try to make it a bit more human, which is funny because we're talking about non intraprocentric design, but you have to bring it back to something to ground it. So I tend to ground it in a human impact and the optimism that I can bring in to say, Okay, cool, this actually helps someone do their job better. This is what they do on day to day. Here's how I can understand it better. At the same time, I think it's like, sometimes I imagine is splitting my brain in two halves and saying, I have two brains right now are two, two visions, right? So one vision is really one eye is looking at the big picture and one eye is looking at the details. You have to hold them simultaneously, which is why I think it's so difficult because you have to see them at the same time in order to make sense of how the small goes into the big and vice versa. So maybe I call it, you know, mental projecting or sometimes I call it like a mental library where I'm just like, Okay, I see the shape of the library. I can also see the books. It's an interesting way of projecting visually into a way of organizing data for me in the books and the library, the forest and the trees. And I think we can make a lot of analogies here. When do you so digging a little bit deeper into this one? You said you're an optimistic person. Do you also, you have, do you also have the patience to see these things come into fruition? The reason I'm asking this is when you do see the big, big picture or the grand vision, usually things don't move at the speed that you wish they would move. Hardly ever. Hardly ever. And especially with again, when you see the potential for humanity can take generations. So what's your coping strategy with the speed at which things do or do not change? This is something I talked about with my wife often. We're working on my patients. But I tend, I'm a pretty impatient person. I like to see impact. And that's at odds with some of the timelines that I tend to be working on sometimes. So how I cope with that is I say, all right, we're making, let's call it a product for 2028 or something like you're starting to work on a product for 2028. We know that the inputs will change along the journey towards 2028. So how I continue to remind myself the output is only as good as the inputs that you have right now. So make the best possible plan or strategy or product idea or concept that you can, given your inputs right now, given the insights from humans, given the business realities, given materials and methods of make, given whatever technological systems you can use, those are your current realities. So don't question them. Just you should question that. We can get that later. But use what you have now because you have that and then recognize that across years, those inputs might shift and change. You might have new technologies available. You might have different human insights. You might have a new supply chain that should and will shift the output that you're moving towards. And that's okay. You should not make something now and say, done, dusted. I'm going to go see how it happens in 20 years from now. So continual reevaluation actually helps my patience level because it helps me continue to process and think about what has shifted, what could shift. But that necessitates a lot of maintenance and tracking, which you can make fun, I promise. It's not as boring as it sounds. But I think that's how I cope is that I have an idea or I'm working on a project. I use the inputs of today, recognizing that inputs of tomorrow may be very different and will impact the output. Can you share us a bit more about how you do the maintenance and how you do the tracking and how you reevaluate and realign? Actually, it's a really simple model, which I'm sure many people already know. It's called the steep model, social, technological, ecological, economic, and political. And those are just ways to look at data points, insights, you know, moments in time across these five different sectors. And it gives you a pretty good kind of called like cultural brailing kind of thing to be like, what's going on in the world around us in a general sense. So you can see if you're looking at something for a scenario around, you know, user-generative farming again, okay, what are the things that are happening in vertical farms? What are the things that are happening politically to drive local farming resources, et cetera, et cetera. And you use this model to help organize your inputs and continue to prompt you to look across different sources. Again, it strives an element of associated fluency, like we were talking about earlier with reading. And then you can start looking at where new prompts are emerging. So that's something that we'd call like move signals, newer things that may seem a little weird or avant-garde or out of the ordinary. And you start tracking these weaker signals as they get stronger and stronger. And that's where you start seeing new trends, new drivers of change emerge that can impact your project or your product or your service that you're designing. That sounds a lot more rigorous than it needs to be. Sometimes it's just saying, hey, what am I noticing and feeling? Does this apply to my project? Does it apply to a product? And this is a continuous practice that I do again, I learned through some of my master's courses at CCA. But it's a nice mental framework to then help guide how you're tracking the ridiculous amount of content that goes out into the world right now and help organize it a little bit in my own brain. So that's what I use. How often do you do this? Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly? This is a continual practice for me. Whenever I read something, I think about it, kind of catalog it my brain. I used to keep a really ridiculous, ridiculous Excel with all this stuff, and I could not maintain that after a couple years. So now it's more of a more of an informal study that's just a continual practice on a daily basis. And then if something pops up, I'm like, ooh, that actually applies to this project over here or that applies to this idea from a couple years ago. That's how I use those inputs. The lovely thing about working in a larger corporation is that projects take time. So you can continue to impact them, even if they're not no longer in your immediate organization or in your group, per se, you can still help drive success because it lives in the organization for a while before it actually launches. So thank you. That's a good example. And I can imagine that having like this steep model, steep, right? That's a model. It just gives you a few prompts to think about society, to think about context beyond your focus, the focus of the challenge that you're working on currently. What's the context that I'm operating in? Have you mentioned that this is at this moment primarily a mental model? Have you used tools like this also to bring this into your organization? Because I can imagine that it's great for your identity as a professional, that you have this contextual awareness. But it helps if you can get the people around you along on the journey to also see like, hey, listen, this is what's going on. And on top of that, like building this contextual awareness as a group, you can imagine that that's enriching as well. Have you ever done a practice like that? There are a few examples of when I used steep in teams. I think it really depends on the organizational appetite as well for ingesting some of this. I think it worked the best when I was at Capital One leading this foresight team. It was called strategic technology, emerging technologies for strategic foresight and something like that. And we started tracking, through the steep model, we started tracking what was changing over time, what we needed to really ingest as we designed services for humans using money. So it was a very specific remit. I think that helped us all think better. It was a small team, it was under 10 people, so it helped it by keeping it tight and a pretty clear remit for what we were looking for. I would love to continue to bring that back into work that I'm doing now. I think it would help look beyond the immediate, again, as we've talked about, look beyond immediate towards what might be emerging, what cultural and societal trends might be impacting a larger swath of humanity and actually nature too. So that's a long way of saying, yes, and I want to do more of it. Well, use this as an excuse to bring it back. You mentioned something, I think, which maybe stepped over to easily the aspect of timelessness. Design is very much driven by time. And how would you, is designing for generations a prompt that gets people to think outside a box now in a different way, to look at challenges in a different way? I'm struggling today to formulate my questions. You're doing a much better job at that, but what's the role of time? I think time plays such an important role. I think one of the tools for strategic foresight is called alternative futures model. And therefore, I'll get to your question on time, just a different example, there are four main archetypes for future potentials. So for future scenarios, there's four main archetypes. There's the growth archetype, which is like, stuff continues as it is right now. Everything that we know just continues to grow up. There's the constraint model. Sometimes it's called discipline, which means like certain elements of our world are rigorously controlled. There's a collapse scenario, which is self-descriptive, you know, some stuff goes really wrong. Armageddon. And then there's the transformation archetype, which is actually the most difficult because you have to think about a fundamental paradigm shift. It's not just growth. It's a total paradigm shift of the society that we live in. None of those scenarios can come to life today. It takes time to recognize how you can actually either paradigm shift or collapse or develop a constraint, governmental situation, for instance. So one of the games I play with my team every month is a card game called The Thing from the Future. And it was originally published, oh gosh, I think maybe eight years ago, by a group called The Situation Lab, Stuart Candy, great foresight practitioner and human. And what it does is actually prompt you with a scenario. So growth, collapse, constraint, or transformation. It prompts you with a time. So a century from now, a decade from now, three centuries from now, and it prompts you with a thing to create given a mood. So you have to create this product in the future on this arc of change given a time. That helps us get outside of what we think about every day and help us think about different ways of engaging our creative capacities as we think about how society can change over time. But more than that, I think whenever you do any kind of foresight work, you can just say the future. The future is this second. It's also 60 years from now. So getting clear on what time we're thinking about actually helps us create more specificity in what we're designing. To say, hey, we're going to design something for a decade from now. Hey, what does that mean? I'll be X amount of years old. Maybe I'll still be drinking tea in the morning as a habit. But what else is going on? So you can actually ground in a time if you use this idea of really getting clear about when we're designing for, even if you're wrong about everything that's going on. I think it's really important to grounding device. When you think about designing for longevity, designing for generations, that's a fascinating problem because I need to think about does this material breakdown, for instance, does it actually give us the same benefit year over year over year? Does it allow us to do something different 10 years from now than it does right now? How does this thing age? And it really gets us into geologic time again, which I think is important metric as we think about our changing world. I just started the Ministry for the Future, which is a Kim Stanley Robinson book who started that last night. And the first chapter is about a heat wave in India that gets up to like 140 degrees. People can't survive on non-generated AC. So people are pulling out their generators, which are really, really old and clunky, and they're filling them with fuel. And they're trying to figure out how to cool down their apartments. That is an old design. Generators are not new sexy designs, but it is made to last because of the necessity that it has. So when we come up with new technological advancements, when we think about new ways that we're engaging in our world, or think about new devices or services, we think about what the most recent cool technology is, but is that the best one for longevity? I don't know. That's a question we should ask. So that was a winding answer to your question. I don't know. It feels like, in general, a very explorative conversation here. So what I wanted to address is who gives us the responsibility or the mandate to think about longevity? The way this question came to mind was a lot of us will probably won't be in situations where we're asked to think about beyond the next quarter, beyond the next yearly budget cycle. And at the same time, a lot has gone on in my head throughout this conversation. While I was formulating this question, I thought, well, we shouldn't be waiting or asking for permission to actually incorporate this into our thinking, being, doing. Nobody is going to ask, well, unless you're in a position like you are, most likely this isn't going to be in our job description any day soon. So it's really up to us to bring this into the world today. Does that make sense? Totally agree. I totally agree. And I don't think many people are mandated with this. I don't think that's a common mandate at all, which makes it fun and subversive. I don't know. I really like subversiveness in some aspects. So if you're like me, if you like subversiveness, think about timelessness with me. But I do think it won't be a common request. I think as humans, we tend to be very immediate. And I think it's one of the most important things we can do is think about how what we do today continues to have impact over time, given the time as a year, if time is a decade, if time is a generation. It's something I think about also. You can apply that to real estate and building. You can apply that to what you put on your body in terms of clothing. You can apply that to what foods you eat. You can apply that to whatever it is. And you just have to balance your own values. So I think when I think about the mandate or lack thereof of thinking about timelessness or timeliness or impact over time, it's really a reflection of what you want to prioritize. And this makes me think about what it means to just be a good practitioner, just like we have to be aware about the ethical implications of the work that we do. We should also be aware of the environmental implications of the work that we put out into the world. Again, it's not a mandate. Nobody is going to ask you to do this, but this is just what good work looks like to incorporate that into what you do on a day to day. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah. So I would say that this is a call to action to all of us to incorporate more strategic foresight into our practice, more thinking games. What was it? The thing from the future? Was that the thing from the future? Yeah, highly recommend. Yeah. Things like this definitely help to raise the bar for the quality of our work. I couldn't find a better word, but I think it's just the quality of the work that we do. I love that call to action. Yeah, let's think about the future together. If you have to leave us with one piece of practical advice and then we'll skip out on the thinking game for now, is there anything in the steep? You actually have given us a lot of practical advice already. Anything else that you can recommend that we do or think about to bring this into our work in our day to day? The one thing we haven't talked about is that I still find really helpful is just trying to get to a co-creation mode, whether you're practicing service design or foresight or design thinking or whatever you're doing. I find co-creation with whatever audience you're targeting just unbelievably helpful to ground in real insight from real stakeholders. Admittedly, that's harder with technology and nature than it is with humans, but I do think that there's a prompt for us all to say, okay, how might we co-create better? What would that look like and what communities or intelligences can we tap into to help us co-create solutions that really get at the heart of what we're designing for? So a huge believer in co-creation and driving collaboration in that way. I think you'll find a lot of bystanders in this show who also believe in the power of co-creation. So that's awesome. Ali, one final question is if people remember one thing from our conversation today, we've explored a lot. What do you hope it is? You know, we started by talking about non-anthropocentric design and I think if people take one thing away, it's to think a little bit more weird about the future and about futures in general, get a little weird, challenge your own thinking in that way. You'll be sure to do something different and fun and really kind of lean into many possible futures that surround us. So this is my prompt for everyone to get weird. I think I have a title for the episode. So thank you for that. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, perspective, wisdom with us today. It was a blast. It was different than a lot of the other conversations. So thank you. Thank you again. Thank you. Lovely to be here. What a privilege to have experts like Ali join us for a chat who keep inspiring and challenging us. Something that got me really excited is the notion of timeless design. Recently, we had a talk about beauty as the ultimate metric in episode 193 with Alan Moore and I'm wondering if timelessness also ties into this. It's a beautiful solution one that also stands the test of time. If you have any thoughts about this, make sure to leave a comment down below. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please do me a quick favor. If you haven't done so already, click that like button on the video to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this. Finally, before we part ways, please take a moment to reflect and celebrate that by joining us today, you've directed your attention to what's learning and growing as a professional. So from everyone who you are going to impact through your work, thank you for taking the time and making the commitment. My name is Marc van Tijn and I look forward to having you with us for another conversation on the service design show. Take care and see you soon.