 I'm Caroline Bowman, director of Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome all of you here tonight for the fifth lecture in the Enid and Lester Morse historic design lecture series. This critical public program was established in 2011 through a gift from our dedicated trustee, Denny Morse, and her husband Lester, and it has been really a cornerstone for us at Cooper Hewitt as part of our public programming while the museum was undergoing this mammoth renovation, and the point of it was to really keep Cooper Hewitt fresh on everyone's minds, which we were successful in doing, so huge thank you to both of you. We have had sold out lecture after sold out lecture including tonight's. Thanks to the tremendous generosity of the Morse's, we've been able to share our vast collection with you, our enthusiastic audience, through a series of presentations on historic design from the renaissance right up to the present day. By leading scholars and experts, we are thrilled to welcome you back to the museum for tonight's lecture. Not only have we renovated and upgraded every inch of Cooper Hewitt's facilities, but we've completely reimagined how we present design. We're revitalizing the visitor experience. And since we opened our doors in December, we've been amazed by the positive response and our numbers. We're very pleased that we just welcomed our 125,000th visitor just yesterday. So it's a wonderful success. And I hope all of you have had a chance to explore the museum and see the fruits of our transformation, which has increased access to the collection like never before. And what a collection it is, over 210,000 objects that span more than 30 centuries. In March, we launched our revolutionary interactive pen, if you haven't seen it, this is it. And it provides new ways for visitors to engage with our collection and permanently record what they've seen on their visit and how they meander through the museum. Since then, visitors have collected over 600,000 objects and created nearly 25,000 original designs. We're thrilled that tonight, renowned designer, visionary thinker, and award-winning author, Bruce Mao, will use examples from our collection to speak about the progress and promise of contemporary design. From handheld smart products to large-scale systems and networks, design has changed the way we connect the world. Today's designers are creating innovative solutions to the greatest challenges in our history, enhancing our quality of life and transforming how we relate to our ever-changing environment. And I really can't think of anyone better suited to speak to us about the future of design than Bruce. Since his groundbreaking 1995 collaboration with Rem Coolhouse on SMLXL, Bruce has led the field in design thinking, including consulting with brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, MTV, and Herman Miller. In 2009, Bruce co-founded Massive Change Network to promote the power of design to create global change. Bruce is a recipient of the Global Creative Leadership Award from the Louise Bluin Foundation and a winner of the AIG Gold Medal for Communication Design. He was a juror for Cooper Hewitt's 2014 National Design Awards. He is the Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is also a distinguished fellow at the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University, where the Massive Change Network is based. So please join me in welcoming Bruce Mao. Thank you, Caroline. Thank you. Can we have the lights down in the... in front of the screen, please? Thank you. First of all, I want to say that I'm absolutely thrilled to be here. I had a chance for the first time to go through the new museum and I have to say it was absolutely stunning. You know, what's going on here, I think, is quite extraordinary in terms of, you know, giving people kind of access to design thinking and the potential that it has to shape the world. So we want to look at the future of design today, this evening, and also look at the collection. So obviously, the future of design is not in the collection yet, so we're going to have to speculate on that. But we are going to look at the collection in some regards to kind of figure out where we think that future of design is going. And that's really what we want to do. And when I was beginning to think about this, I came to this question. And it really comes from sort of understanding what's going on right now. When I look at where design is in society, I see designers all over the place engaged and involved, and in some cases leading, the big conversations, the big discussions about what we're doing and where we're going. And it occurred to me that it's a really interesting question, why they're doing that? They're not really trained to do that. We're not diplomats or trained in that expertise. But nonetheless, we are in that conversation. And it kind of got under my skin as a question to say, why are designers the advocate for the citizen? And why are we the ones who seem always to be arguing for the individual, the citizen, the person, and therefore the community, and by extension the environment? That there's a kind of ethic in the conversation that is driven by design that really sort of comes from that place. And I was just wondering, why is that the case? Where does that really emanate from? What's the kind of cultural source of that? And why do designers care? Why is it that we care? Why don't we behave like everybody else? If you think about it, I was on my way to an opening at the School of Architecture in Toronto one time. And I said, you know, we really should call it a development, because then we get all the money. But my wife asked me, why wouldn't you do that? I'm not prepared for that just yet. But for me, it is an interesting question, why designers care so much? Where is that coming from? So I wanted to first look at the Cooper Hewitt collection. And when I got started on this, they sent me a beautiful project by Irma Boone, that was the kind of documentation of the collection, or a kind of perspective on it, at least. And I was jealous, frankly. You know, it makes your heart race. It's so beautiful. The combination of objects, the depth of the collection, the complexity of the origins, it's really quite extraordinary what comes together here. And you really get, you know, from this book kind of view into that. So you see these kind of things brought together that are really stunning. Extraordinary work by Hela Jungarius, Vaz, beautiful combinations of material, color, and images that is kind of classic Irma Boone. I mean, this is her at her best, really putting things together in a way that, you know, surprise and delight. Extraordinary object by Massimo Vignelli, combined with a fishnet. I mean, it's really an actual fishnet. Not just an image of a fishnet. And this tall green bloom, this beautiful new kind of object that clearly resonates and references objects from the past. And she kind of lets you kind of see those relationships in such a beautiful way. And, you know, the more I looked at it, the more impressed I was. You know, this little camera, it's called a lightro. It's a new kind of technology that is called a light field image. So it doesn't photograph a flat surface image. It actually creates a spatial image. So it captures all the light field. And after you have that, you can actually manipulate it from different angles and focus, change the focus where you want to. It's really quite extraordinary as a new thing. And in some ways, it kind of embodies my insight that new forms require new forms. You know, that new things, new ways of doing things in the world, need new forms to express them. If you look at the history of the collection, what you see is a history of new ways of living expressed in new ways. You know, demanding new expression, requiring new expression. So you see this extraordinary work by Noguchi. And it's a beautiful thing. It's a radio nurse. It's a first baby monitor. So you would put this with your baby and you would hear the baby's voice. And it has the, you can see the kind of visual expression of both the technology and the kind of historical reference of the nurse. Ingo Maurer, an extraordinary piece of work. This apparently is the single most downloaded image so far by the pen as an object. And we begin to see the kind of, this thing might be going in projects like this that is really sort of taking, imagining a kind of sketch in three-dimensional space that is then output into a three-dimensional object. So you can kind of sketch it, you can sketch an object in a three-dimensional virtual space. And then that object actually gets output as a physical thing. And I see also some old friends, for me one of the most important people of the last century is a man named Otto Neurath, his work is on the left. He was really the inventor of what he called isotypes or, you know, information graphics. He was the first person to really think, you know, what we can actually compress information into visual signals that are much faster than actually the data or the text if you had to describe it or see the numbers. But mostly it's a kind of holiday of imagination and visual pleasure. I mean the combinations and just the kind of visual richness of it is absolutely extraordinary. I mean, you know, I've been quoted as saying I don't care what it looks like. But I actually spend most of my time obsessing over that. And so, you know, I live this contradiction. But you can see in these, I mean, I want everything here, you know, I want it all. I mean, it's just so beautiful. I think that, you know, what you've done is so amazing. And you see, you know, kind of classical and contemporary living together in such an extraordinary way. And this is the new way. This is the new world. This is our children's world. You know, they, you know, all of musical history is available to them today. It's all accessible and they combine it. And we combine it in such new and interesting ways where the references and the resonances are really super beautiful. And you can source concepts where, you know, just extraordinary resonance from images and objects. Now, one thing I was really surprised by in the book was that there was only one ostensibly obvious political image, which was this image of Jacob Avera. And I was surprised by that. And in fact, when I arrived today, I saw, in fact, that there's a lot more engagement in the kind of political dimension of what we do. And it's not that beauty isn't political. It's not that all those other things that we just looked at aren't political. But I was surprised that there was such a kind of minimal presence of the overtly political when you think about the current engagement of designers in political ideas and issues. And we see how important design is to realizing political, political ideas and, you know, when it works and when it doesn't. So it was, to me, a kind of surprising insight to see that. But the kind of dominant feeling, the dominant sort of impression when you go through the whole collection, as presented in the book at least, is beauty. It is intimate objects of extraordinary beauty. And the intimacy for me is a very important idea because I think partly because of the way that the collection started, you know, that you had two women collecting their, you know, their favorite things, that you had a kind of intimacy in the things that they were collecting. But the intimacy actually is, in some ways, universal to the things. It's some way universal to the design and the dominant idea is beauty. That, in fact, the thing that, you know, when you walk around the museum, every single thing is something that you, as I said, you want to have it. It has this kind of incredible effect. And what I realized when I was thinking about that intimacy, you know, where that came from, I realized that for designers, we begin with the user. Our way of thinking, I mean, the reason that we care is that we are actually focused on the user. We're focused on the individual citizen. The experience of the citizen is our metier. It's not the object, actually. It's really the experience. So we're designing the object to produce the experience. And that physical and emotional connection to the individual. So that, in the end, that becomes a very intimate, I mean, I never really thought about it this way, but I realized that my work is extremely intimate. You know, I've designed a couple of hundred books, and I spend all of my energy trying to understand, how do I make the experience unfold for the reader? How do I make it kind of emerge cinematically and kind of dynamically unfold for the reader? That's the, that's that, I'm not thinking about thousands of readers. I'm really thinking about an individual person having that experience and designing it for that person and designing at that level of detail. And not, not the viewer, but the reader. That kind of intimacy is very different. When you're a viewer, you can stand off at a distance and experience something. As a reader, you're actually in close and you're inside of it. You're, you notice a typo. And a viewer doesn't notice a typo. So that kind of intimacy is at the core of what we do. And whether, whether we're doing something urban, even if, even if you're designing at a kind of urban scale, you're still thinking of the individual citizen experiencing that urban scale. So that really begins to define what design is in this way. It's, it's a way of giving humanity to technique. So throughout the collection is a lot of focus on, you know, the kind of evolving technique of, of the production of objects. But in every case, it's actually the design, kind of sort of using that technique and giving it kind of a human face, a human expression. Designers express our desires as objects and opportunities. What we really do is, is sort of understand intimately that kind of desire for experience. And we design that as an opportunity or an object to say, look, you know, you, you can do this. And in the end, we give voice to business. And this is for me a kind of very personal dimension to it. You know, when I first started as a designer, I was not happy with what I was saying. I worked in a, in a corporate design studio. I wasn't, I felt like I was designing the prison that I was going to have to live in. And I wasn't happy with, I loved what, I loved the look of what I was doing. But I didn't, I didn't love the impact. And so I ended up creating a little company with two friends called Public Good. And the idea of Public Good was very simple. This was about 30, some years ago. And, but the idea of Public Good was very simple. It was simply that we wanted to use our energy, our time, you know, because we worked so hard. I wanted that work to go to things that I believed in. And this was, you know, before the NGO revolution. So there wasn't, you know, there wasn't a kind of big movement already to do this. And a lot of people, a lot of designers actually told me to my face that they thought I was crazy, that, you know, that you can't do that. You know, why, why should you be able to do that? You know, why, you know, who do you think you are that you can only work on things that you like? Seems crazy to me. But that's that giving voice to business. If you think about what designers do, especially then, you know, you, you, you express, you express the business, you express the idea, you express the market concept, you express the product, you express the ambition, you express the opportunity. You're really, you know, in some ways you're a kind of ventriloquist. And, and the, you know, the client is asking you to say certain things. And I think what's happened over the years since we started Public Good is the idea that we would actually say things we don't like is now, I think, not acceptable. It's, you know, for the most part, not the way that designers want to work. And so more and more people are applying the ethic that, that is inevitable when you have the intimacy in the relationship with the citizen, you inevitably come to the realization, you know, this whether, whether or not the thing is good for them. So in this context, what is beauty? So if you think about, you know, why is beauty an important idea in this context? I think it actually, you know, it becomes kind of, it becomes paramount. Because what beauty is really is caring. It's caring about the detail. It's caring about the experience. It's caring about the impact. It's caring about the ecology. It's caring about the way things are. And that is, I think, a very beautiful life. Like, if you think about living that life of caring, that, you know, what you're really doing is trying to understand, you know, what's the best we can do? What's the best we can be? It actually is a very demanding, but very rewarding and beautiful life. Now, I wanted to take a little detour into my own collection, because I'm a bit obsessive about these things. And I have a collection of Guatemalan textiles, because I've been working there for several years. And when I first saw them, I was really, I thought they were absolutely stunning. So I put them in the book format that Irma did. Now, that's my own page of extraordinary designs. And what's really fascinating is that there's no manual for how these things get done. But people know how to do them. So, and in every town, they have their own pattern, their own design. And so, you know, when we were traveling around Guatemala, I saw these incredible designs. And I just thought, wow, this is so beautiful. And began to kind of, you know, collect them as I went. What I didn't realize was that what I was really collecting was prison uniforms. So the patterns developed, unique patterns developed in towns in Guatemala, in Mayan communities over time. And when the Spanish arrived, as part of the kind of apartheid, they made everyone in every town wear the pattern of their local town, so that they couldn't move around. They couldn't organize. So if you showed up in another town in the wrong pattern, you know, you stuck out like a thumb. And these beautiful patterns are really part of a kind of incredibly oppressive culture that has gone on to this day. And in fact, I'm going to show you a project that we did in Panama, I mean, in Guatemala, that really kind of brings this story to a head and kind of starts to think about what's the future of design. So one day in my studio, a letter arrived and the letter was from the Minister of Education in Guatemala. And the letter explained that a small group of citizens had been working to imagine a better future for Guatemala. And that work had led them to the work that I was doing and they were asking me to come to Guatemala and collaborate with them. Now, the letter was from the, you know, the letter only had the Minister of Education as a letterhead. I guess in Guatemala, everybody knows how to reach the Minister of Education, but I didn't. So I asked my assistants, you know, look, they're bound to call in a few days. So when they do, I really want to talk to them. And I met an extraordinary group of people. They explained that they had experienced, you know, their people had experienced 36 years of civil war. So most of the population didn't know anything else. Most of the population had only experienced in their whole lifetime war. And they said, we don't have the ability to dream. Citizens no longer have the ability to imagine a future that isn't violence, poverty, and corruption. I said, when we ask our citizens, what's, you know, what does your future look like? They say it's those three things. Those images dominate the culture. I said, if you walked into a class, you know, of children in a grade school and asked them what they want to be when they grow up, they wouldn't have an answer. And it was so striking to me that, you know, how do you not dream? How do you not have an image of the future? But you realize that actually an image of the future is a culture. We have a culture of dreaming. We have a culture of design. What this place is about is the culture of imagining the future. That's not something that is automatic, especially if you have 36 years of the culture of death. And so this was so compelling, and they said, you know, we'd like you to come and help us. And so a few days later, I was on my way to Guatemala with my family. And we met these extraordinary people. And the first thing they did was they took me to meet the vice president. And they said, this is Bruce, and he's going to redesign Guatemala. And I said, like, hey, guys, we got to talk right away, because it's actually not what we talked about. You know, I don't think you should actually do that, because I can't do it. And if anyone offers to do that for you, you should run away from them. The only people who are going to do it are Guatemalans, because it's your problem. I got all kinds of ways that I can help you. You know, we're going to talk about how to do that. But ultimately, you're going to redesign Guatemala. And that's what you have to do. And they said, OK, but you've got to change the name of the country. Wow, you guys really think big. And I said, why? You know, why would you want to do that? And they said, well, the place is called Guate. And when the Spanish got here, they hated it. Guatemala, which is like bad Guate. And they said, hey, how would you like to wake up every day in United States? Bad place. I said, you got a point. And so in our team, in the course of our work, we added an extra A. And it became Guate Amala, which is the love of Guate. And we started the Amala movement. We designed the Amala movement to imagine a future of Guatemala that was positive. And we developed a strategy that was very simple, which was to show people what was actually happening, that people were absolutely convinced that nothing was happening or that there was nothing but murders and violence and poverty and corruption. And so we started the project together. It was one of the most extraordinary things I've ever been involved in. One of the things that we do in our work is what we call posturing, which is to just do posters as if you make posters as if you won. What would it feel like 10 years from now if we won? What posters would we be producing? And we produced about 100 of these things. And they were about the culture of life. And what we realized was that the culture of life that we depend on, that we work off of, cannot simply be turned on. You can't just say, okay, now the war is over, now we're going to have justice. You actually have to build a culture of justice. We've built a culture of entrepreneurship in this place. We've built a culture of freedom, a culture of justice, a culture of education, a culture of dreaming. Over hundreds of years of work and sacrifice and in some cases, people giving their lives so that we can have the opportunities that we do. So we did a project called the culture of life in Guatemala. And the moment we showed these, we laid about 50 of them out in a big hall on the floor. And everyone who came in said, okay, we're in, we want to do it. And so we said, look, you're going to do it, we're going to help you. They did this extraordinary event in the center of Guatemala City. It was a huge kind of Roman forum. It was an exhibition on the culture of life. And when people went inside, they went through this kind of exhibition, the nine cultures of life. And when they got to the end, they had an opportunity to sign up and join the movement. And we hoped to get a thousand people because in Guatemala for 36 years, if you put your name on lists, black SUVs showed up and you were never heard from again. So people generally don't put their name on lists. We got 11,000 people. It was way beyond what anyone imagined. And it, you know, we had to have a kind of emergency meeting to figure out what to do with all these people. But it was a good problem to have. And so when you got inside of that exhibit, this is what you saw. You saw 200 leaders who were changing Guatemala, who were already doing it, who had mostly never met one another. And it had an absolutely extraordinary impact. And it was designed as a movement to move from place to place. Not that we went with it, but rather that we handed it off. So we did it in Guatemala City. The next group of people took it to another place. And it went around Guatemala. And now it's moving around Central America. And in fact, when the Museum of the Art of Chicago opened their new modern wing in Chicago, the biggest thing presented in the design collection was this project that they showed nine posters from Guatemala. And our entire team came up to Chicago for it. And I've never had more fun in the museum in my whole life. These people went absolutely crazy. They spent a whole day photographing themselves with this thing in the museum. And they were absolutely thrilled that because we promised that if they did it, that they would actually export the ideas. And to see their project in the context in Chicago was a real treat. Now, when I think about what was that, when I became a designer, I never imagined having to deal with that. I mean, when we started the project, they said, look, if you don't do this right, people are going to get killed. And they could be your people. And like it wasn't, they weren't kidding. They said, look, if you don't handle this right, people are going to get killed. And you could be among them. So you really have to be thoughtful. And on a very serious note, we met a woman who was working with a family where their entire male population was killed by the people in the next village just before the peace was agreed. And part of the peace was when you have to draw a line and say anything had happened before that was war, after it's murder. But before that was actually under the war. And the way that it worked is that the forces from one side would push the forces from the other side out, and then they would punish anyone who cooperated with the other side. And then six months later, the other side would push them out, and they would punish anyone who cooperated. So in this one place where this family was, they had 200, 200 massacres. So when I think about what kind of design is that? I just think I didn't get trained to do that. I grew up in northern Canada and on a farm outside of a mining town. And we didn't have running water in the winter. It was minus 40 for weeks on end. And so our house was kind of built on a rock, so the water couldn't get in there. And I realized that for the longest time, I really didn't think, how is that relevant to what I do? But I realized in retrospect that it actually kind of empathy. Like I share that with about 12% of the world population. But 12% of us don't have running water today. Some of them still in Canada. So I'm always shocked when there's someone in the room who grew up like that in this kind of modern world, kind of super modern life. And I'm even more shocked that it's me. What, how did that happen? But I went to school and I became a designer. And I studied graphic design, communication design. And I saw that things were happening that were going to change things, that there was a computer actually programmed a computer that they taught us how to do it. And we had to send this stuff away to the computer. And then they sent our programs back a couple of weeks later. And so I saw this thing happening. And I started to understand that, in fact, the context was going to change. And that I needed to understand the context in order to understand what I could offer and where I could contribute. And then the process, I became an author. And the kind of designer and the author became kind of one thing. Because in order to understand that, I had to write it down. And that became the course of my work. I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my work. I've had the most amazing collaborators and mentors, including Frank Gehry. This is, we worked on the 13 years. I worked with MoMA to move them into their new digs. But that transition that I saw was a world changing from opaque to transparent. It was a world moving from a situation where, if you put it up on the image, that's all that anyone could see. And no one could actually see behind it. You couldn't see through that image. You couldn't get around it and see whether or not the company was actually doing what the image said. So you could get away with anything. You just, whatever the brand was, whatever the image was, that's what it was. And it was really, it was very, very difficult to actually connect and see, is that really true to the brand? But that's gone. That era is over. We're now living in a transparent era where everything is visible. Everything is accessible. Everything that, if you think that you can keep, it's just not, that's not the way it works anymore. And so that meant that the work changed. The clients were no longer asking us, what do we look like? They were asking us, what do we do? What do we, what should we do? And I like to think that if you turn the sound off and just watch the action, the action should tell the story. You shouldn't need any additional things. And if the action isn't the story that you want to tell, you should redesign the action. You should redesign what you're doing to tell the story that you want to tell. That meant a change in design from visual form to enterprise design. So it went from beauty and object and image to really thinking about the whole organization as a design project. And that turned into projects like the work that we did with REM on the Seattle Public Library, really trying to understand the social program of the library in the home of Microsoft, working with the Jets and designing the experience for the fans, and ultimately working on a 1,000-year plan for the future of Mecca. And again, I never imagined that designing the future of Mecca was what I would do when not hunting. But in fact, it's a very pragmatic problem. They get millions of people all at once. Many people get killed every year in the crush because it's so badly designed. So they commissioned us to do a 20-year plan. And my response was, it's Mecca. Let's do a 20-year plan. Let's do a 1,000-year plan. Because if you do 20 years, you're going to design it around the car, which is just about to be over. Whereas if you do 1,000 years, you don't know what it's going to be. So you have to design for what you don't know. You have to design an open system. It's a design problem. So what is enterprise design? It's big picture imagination on time and on budget. You're actually combining the ability to envision the future, but you have to do it responsibly, host a creativity with discipline, creative freedom, and rigorous systematic analysis. So you want to keep that ability to explore things, but you're doing it on a kind of base of data. And ultimately, it's a synthesis of art, technology, and science. Enterprise design is the ability to envision our future and step by step systematically execute the vision, which when I began to think about what that really is, it's an extraordinary methodology for producing the future that we want. We either do it this way or we do it by accident. And it's either by design or by accident. Now in that case, the object is no longer the object of design. The thing that we are so in love with is no longer the kind of central interest. It's not that it doesn't have a place or role. And it's not that it might not be the way that we organize everything else, but it's not the real project anymore. Designers are looking to the natural world and thinking holistically. So if you look at natural systems and see how natural systems work, it's not object-based. It's ecology. They're moving beyond a singular object as the output of their work and instead designing ecologies of solutions. So it's, again, no longer a kind of singular solution. The idea that we will, if you think about the educational, the discussion around education in this country is a monoculture trying to be killed by another monoculture. It's like, which monoculture do we want to choose? The one that we have or a new monoculture? And actually, that's just a wrong-headed approach. If you did it in an organic way of thinking this way, you would evolve, in fact, a kind of diversity, a diverse ecology of education that would provide all sorts of different modes that would be ultimately the solution to the challenge that we have. So that really becomes what the project is of design now. So if you think about the challenge for the museum, that's a tough challenge because we don't have a way of actually, there's no ecology gallery. We don't have a good ecology show. So if you look at these objects, the two early Macintosh computers on the left, they're not interesting as design objects. They're not particularly compelling as design objects. They're very compelling as systematic objects. They're very compelling as parts of an ecology. Similarly, if you look at the early iPod, I mean, it's very cool. I remember when it first happened. It's very cool. But again, it's not a kind of revolutionary thing. What's really revolutionary is that there was a whole other design underneath it, which was an ecology. This is five years of the iTunes interface at the first five years. And you can see it's really quite extraordinary that that is really what made the thing work. I mean, it wasn't that the product itself wasn't a compelling piece of it, but the real kind of design of it was an ecology. And that turns into this kind of incredibly rich, diverse, cultural thing that is this kind of all over the place, all over the culture kind of experience that synthesizes all of that stuff. And you can see what happens as a consequence. So 2003 is the iTunes store opens and the scale of the enterprise changes. So up until that point, it's bumping along and doing its thing, quite successful at times. But when ecology of the enterprise changes. And you can see it as it climbs up that you're adding dimensions to the ecology. So every time that you add a dimension to the ecology, you add richness to the experience. You add complexity. You add peace to the whole. So if you think about that kind of design, that's enterprise design. That's thinking holistically about design. And of course, they're obsessed about the object, but the real design is happening. The design is the system, not the graphics. This is the winning design for Obama in 08. And that little button on the bottom more, they tested these four buttons. So they started to do testing in the market. So they would do things, put them out, see what happened, measure it, change it, evolve it. The whole thing was actually designed as a system. That little button was worth $60 million. The design of learn more is worth $60 million. As director of analytics for the Obama 2008 campaign, it's by Dan Soroker. My job was to use data to help the campaign make better decisions. We started with just one simple experiment back in December of 2007. This experiment taught us that every visitor to our website was an opportunity, and taking advantage of that opportunity through website optimization and A-B testing could help us raise tens of millions of dollars. They went on to raise, of course, $1 billion. And this is from Time Magazine. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina, so this is now the 2012, had promised a totally different metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal, but political instincts might not be the means. Now we're using design. We're going to measure every single thing in this campaign, he said, after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation with an official chief scientist for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions. So you see that, in fact, the graphics, of course, that's what we see as designers, but what's really the design is the cave out of Obama headquarters. This was where the real kind of data crunching happened and where all the secrets were held. So nothing was released from this room so that no one could actually understand what they were able to see. Compete with beauty, but win by designing the system. So when Tesla wanted to launch their platform, they could have made a minivan, but instead they made the Roadster. And the Roadster's car on the planet, and it's also the coolest. And a friend of mine in Toronto's a car collector, he has a Ferrari and the Roadster, and he said, since I got the Roadster, I never touched the Ferrari. That's how we're gonna win. You know, we're not gonna win by making smart things smarter than stupid things. We're gonna win by making smart things cooler than stupid things, more beautiful than stupid things. So when Detroit thinks of a car, they think it's a car problem. We have to design a car. When they think about the problem that we're facing, they think the answer is a car. Tesla thinks the answer is a system. They think it's a system that has a car in it. So this is the supercharger system that allows you to travel in states and charge your car in a few minutes. And so that anywhere you, if you wanna travel around, there's a kind of system. And this is the kind of first tier, but there's also second and third tiers. So you can see that the way that they think about it isn't a car. And I have to say, we actually bought a Tesla. And when I experienced it, when we went to try it, I didn't think it was, I didn't expect that it would be different than any other car, frankly. I thought it would be nice. I was very excited about it. But when we got in that car, it was like a totally different experience because it's an interface with wheels. The whole idea is an experience design that moves. So it's all about that experience. Whereas from the Detroit perspective, they think it's a car and we need to put a computer in it. And that's a fundamentally different perspective in the way that the design is defined. And finally, expand the design brief to include the whole world. Tom's is a very good concept. It's one for one. If you buy one pair, they give one pair. But if you think about what that means as a design brief, you made the problem twice as hard. If you're gonna give one pair away, I have to make that shoe for half the cost of any other shoe. And that's what they did. And it's such a brilliant, I mean, it's so powerful as an idea because it, you know, people, I mean, my kids all wear them. They love the idea. They love the idea that by doing that, they're someone else's getting the benefit. And on the right is the new book, Start Something That Matters, and it works the same way. So if you buy a book, someone else gets one for free. And you can see that, like, that's a totally different problem than designing the shoes. Obviously, the shoes have to be great. I mean, you need a great result. But the definition of the result is the system, not the shoe. Through it all, designers maintain an abiding empathy for the citizen, the user, the consumer, the person, the individual. So our focus is the experience of that person. Designers care. That's the core. And what you realize is that the kind of core operating system of design is caring. That's why that empathy value is central to what we do. And in that sense, it's really about designing leadership. If you think about, if we're informed in that way, that's what design is. It's a method for envisioning a positive future and systematically executing the vision. And that's why we're designing what we call personal black box. And I just wanna end with this project as it's something that I've been involved with now for a little over a year. And it's really, for me, very inspirational. I'm working with a man named Halu Kulin, who's here, he's a CEO, and a quite extraordinary team, including Nell Marlina, who's the chair of the trust, who's also here. And I'll show you sort of where we're going. So we start with this kind of insight that we are producing exponential quantities of personal data. And that data is being left all over the place in businesses, wherever you're doing things. So if you're ordering things or looking at things or exploring things or in any way kind of sharing your online information, it's being accumulated. And there's a kind of black market behind the scenes of that data. And it used to be that the old kind of business thinking is you collect everything. You try to get everything, that's what business does. It tries to dominate. And so that culture of domination said, get it all. If it comes by, just take it, keep it. You might use it later. But Target actually found out that that's not such a good idea. And I think it's now at 272 million and it's still climbing. That because when that data accumulates, it becomes a risk. So what was a positive is now becoming a negative. And we don't really understand where it is. We don't realize that people behind the scenes in this kind of black market of data are gathering it and trading it and selling you to the highest bidder. And so you're getting this kind of incredible accumulation of risk. To eliminate these risks, Personal Black Box gives the data back to the people. So the idea is that we basically allow you to own your data and to control it and have privacy and have the value of the data. Not only the kind of ability to have it, but you get security control and an ability to learn, grow and profit from the data. In exchange, brands get better information but always anonymized so they don't know who you are. But because you can accumulate your data, you're gonna accumulate it in a much richer and better way than anyone else can. So the idea is simply that if we could secure all of your data in an account in the PVB trust, you would have your own Personal Black Box. And in that, you could see your digital mirror. So you could see how you were living, how you were learning. You could see where the opportunities were for growth. You could set goals, you could set objectives and get rewards. And because your rewards are actually your goals, because your rewards are for your goals and what you're setting, brands actually are no longer shooting at you, they're on your side. So companies are now helping you to reach your goals and you've invited them to do that. And so the idea is that we start with this idea of trust, that we design the trust. And if you think about enterprise design, the trust is a design idea. A trust and a company sitting next to each other where the trust has the authority to audit and secure your data and to protect you in every way. And that only you can access that data. It's designed in a completely different way than the way that Target, for instance, might store your data. In our case, we don't want to see it. So we design it in a way that's kind of super secure by distributing it rather than assembling it. And then we allow you to actually declare the kinds of things that you're interested in. So we developed the PBB digital mirror. That gives you a kind of 360 degree view of the information that you create in the world. So for instance, one of the things that we're working on is the kind of lifetime value mirror. So even the poorest person has a huge lifetime value. The poorest person is going to eat throughout their whole life. They're going to buy clothes. They're going to do all sorts of things. They're actually worth a small fortune. But they don't necessarily see it that way. And for the first time, you can kind of begin to see who you are and where you fit into this picture. You start to see trends in the patterns. You can see how the information is changing, how you compare to others. And you can manage that image. So instead of people seeing you in the dark behind your back, accumulating your data in some funky way that doesn't actually reflect you, you can actually manage the goals that you wanna set. You can manage who sees the data that you have. And you can manage towards making the data reflect who you really are. And you can monetize it. So because you now control and own the data, companies will pay to have access to you as a consumer based on your lifetime value without ever losing your privacy. So you don't have to compromise your privacy, but you can't have all the benefits. So instead of that money going to a data fracker and being paid to somebody in a marketing capacity, that money goes directly to the consumer. So we can imagine that one of the things that we're looking at is how do we interact with people? And this is a little form called a boost that your coach can send you a boost to help you towards your goal as you're working. Now the impact of this is that a typical American mom who makes 70% of the buying decisions for a family can earn about $350 a month in cash for doing the things she's already doing, for buying the things that she needs for a family and having the capacity to do so much more at the same time. And on the flip side of it, instead of brands working against you, working to interrupt you, shooting at you like you're a target, they come around the other side and actually join you in your efforts to do what you're trying to do. So they're on your team rather than thinking of you as a target. If you think about the way that we thought about sustainability 15 years ago, 15 years ago, sustainability wasn't on the radar screen of most companies. They didn't see it as a kind of issue that they would have to actually be part of. Now if you don't have a sustainability platform, you're not a company. You know, your brand is dead. So you, and the same thing is gonna happen with data that 10 years from now people will either have an approach to data in their brand that is this new kind of ethic or they simply won't have a brand at all. So if we think of designers this way as advocates for the creation of value for the citizen, the community and the environment, designers really are designing the redefinition of wealth. With this definition we can imagine legal design, organizational design, experience design, the design of social movements of justice and learning, wellness and knowledge. It's really the design of life. The challenge for the Cooper Hewitt as a design museum is to liberate design from the visual. If you think about what happened in art 50 years ago, Marcel Duchamp said he wanted to liberate art from the tyranny of the image. He wanted to have art as an idea. That happened 50 years ago in art. It hasn't happened yet in design. And this is I think really what's going on, that we are finally thinking of design independent of the visual to collect and display invisible systems of interconnected ecologies of objects, dynamic interfaces, information and interactions. So that is the challenge to the museum, to liberate design from the visual and to collect and display invisible systems of interconnected ecologies of objects, dynamic interfaces, information and interactions. Now Caroline hasn't actually said that, but she told me she would. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm more than happy to answer questions. Are there any questions up there? I'm willing to bark like a dog if you don't. Here we go, works every time. Okay. First of all, it was extraordinary. Just extraordinary, I'm processing it. I have a, if as a citizen who's interested in design, from an art background, interested in public space and physical disability in particular. Have an idea. Started working with disabled students to create a pathway that's really, the missing, okay. I'm so overwhelmed by what you said that I'm inarticulate, I'm sorry. Okay. There can be in many public spaces, all the hard stuff stung, the elevated, the ramp that I said that. You can't find your way because there's no sign. So out of the problem, out of the frustration, a group of students that were in wheelchairs decided we're gonna tackle this design on the ground with chalk, a path, the Yellowburg Road. So it's a great idea and I didn't know that the missing link had been, how do you create a system and pass it on? Kind of was in the back of my mind until I heard you say it. The question is, every time I try and have a larger con, it's very difficult to do. So without a name and it's, the question is how do you get it out there in a way? Other than just random, you know, viral? It's a great question. It's so interesting that you bring up ADA because ADA I think is one of the greatest pieces of design in history. It's a text that basically outlines what we have to do to allow access to our world to everyone. I can think about that as a kind of, like in the thesis of designer's care. That is, I should have included it. I kind of bummed I didn't do it. And I work with it a lot. I mean, when you're doing anything in public buildings, ADA is the governing document. And what people don't realize is that it's the governing document in many places in the world. I mean, Canada, for instance, just said, hey, great, let's use it. Like, we don't need to redo it. We're just gonna apply it. So every building in Canada has the same, we use the American ADA, American with Disabilities Act guidelines. So it's a great example of a systems design that has transformed the world. I mean, people, you know, it's hard to imagine, but it was not long ago that you couldn't have, people didn't have access. If you live in a wheelchair, you were homebound. Now it's really quite amazing. But getting to your question of how do you get that conversation out? You know, when I was quite young, I had this kind of image in my head that there was a very, very thin filament around the entire world. But there was a kind of surface that covered the whole world. And on that, in that kind of material, there were people that were, and I was looking for them. And the only information that traveled in that material was truth. So the only way to reach them was to be true to what I was trying to do. If I compromised the signal, they would never find me. Find them. So if you're looking to do something like that, it's so important to put the right signal out and put it out for a really long time. You know, like I worked as a student, I lived as a student for a couple of decades in order to do the work that I do. And by doing that, by living very modestly, I could do the things that I, I could keep the signal pure by doing the things that you wanna do. And I remember realizing that time is genetic. It's like today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. And so what you do today produces your tomorrow. And it might produce a tomorrow three years from now, but if you're trying to do something like that, it's so important to keep putting the signal out in as pure a form as possible. Any other questions? I don't wanna squeak that way, but thank you. I have two questions, one small and one's maybe larger. I've always thought, I loved your example of Tesla and how the system, innovative, taking Ombridge with the toms relative to everything else you said about empathy and connectedness and globalism, that the idea always has struck me as very weak that you would buy a pair of shoes in our culture and it would somehow go to somebody disadvantaged with very little conversation about the roots of global poverty and that he'd never talks about putting factories in the places where kids actually need shoes. So I've always thought that when I see toms, I don't like that idea. And I'm curious just if you don't mind digging into that a little bit deeper in terms of why you used that as an example, because all the other examples you gave so struck me as truly humanistic and that one misses it for me. Well, I think that in any of these kinds of things, some is gonna resonate sort of more deeply and in some cases not at all with different people. For me, what was interesting was the challenge that it represents to design. Let's assume that, and I am assuming that they're responsible in where those shoes go and how they go and that the kind of ethic informs the rest of the company. I don't know that to be true. I also don't know what to be not true. But if that's the case, then the challenge is absolutely extraordinary. It's a really amazing challenge to say it would be like Detroit saying, we're gonna build two cars for every car and one of them's gonna go for free to somebody who's poor. That's what they're doing. So then you can go in and like in any industrial enterprise there are going to be compromises and issues that one person might say that's not the way to do it and another person might say, well that is the best way to do it. But I think that I'm interested in pushing the brief. If you think about the design brief as a kind of concept. When I first started, there was an obsession about getting the design brief as small as humanly possible. It was like, how could we make it one word? Could we get it to one sentence, one word, maybe just a phoneme? That would be the ideal design brief. And we've worked to go the other way to say, let's expand the brief, make it as complex as we possibly can, understand the ecology, understand that actually all the ins and outs are opportunities. So for instance, lots of businesses throw away a lot of value in the way that they do things because they don't see it as an input to anything. They see it as an output of garbage. So they have a garbage output and they just let it be garbage. A design thinking sensibility that takes this approach would say, actually if it's material going out of here, it's an input into something. And the new way of thinking about that holistically is to really design a complex system where outputs become inputs. So for instance, we use an example, there's an urban brewery where they were going bankrupt. Because they were an urban brewery, they had to ship all the stuff that they used to make the beer, had to come into the city. They made the beer and then they had this huge waste that they had to pay to export out to garbage. And when the people at Zerry looked at it, they said, well, that output is actually usable as an input for baked goods. It's usable as an input for a mushroom business, or as input for a worm business. So we could be actually producing baked goods, mushrooms, and worms in addition to the beer. Now those other things are almost as big in revenue as the beer with no new inputs. And there's essentially no waste in the system, there's no trash. And if you look at a forest floor, there's no garbage there. It's all material that is there for the next generation of life. And if you think about taking that approach to business, you can really quite dramatically change what it is that you're doing. But you have to think in that way. Like if you think, I mean, they were going bankrupt because they thought they were a brewery. And so for me, that's my interest in Tom's. And I have no doubt that there are some problems in the way they do things. Yes? It's engaging the younger demographic, and I think that's a really important aspect of Tom's is that I'm not defending them in any way, but the fact that they're looking towards the younger generation to actually start thinking about design in the way that we're thinking about it, or trying to think about it and push forward. Yeah. Very interested in the PB personal black box and the idea of kind of owning your data. But as you mentioned, that things were going from opacity to transparency. And I'm wondering if you're looking at this digital mirror, what you might actually, you might scrub some blemishes as your public fate, that it might actually go in a direction of more opacity because you can control, you can kind of create a kind of perfect self to present. You can create a self that you control in a way that you can control in what you look like in the morning, right? And I think that people have the right to do that. They should have the right to benefit from their data and control their data. And it's not that, and there are already laws that actually reinforce that, but currently there's so much leakage and we don't realize that we're kind of giving away. And then when we click that button, we're actually giving away our rights. And it can be really detrimental. I mean, it's not only, it's not like if you look in the mirror and you have a bad hair day, you think, well, maybe tomorrow would be better. But if you have a bad, if you get a bad data footprint, it can mean no job, no loan, no school. You know, it can be real ramifications. What this allows you to do is to actually understand what people see and control how much you want them to see so that you're actually deciding what they see of you. And it's a very different model. And in fact, when we talk to brands about it, they love the idea. Like Enlightened Brands want to do that because they don't like the data frackers and the kind of black market any more than you do. And Enlightened Brands want to be contributing to society in the best possible way. That's what they're trying to do. So they don't want to actually be part of a kind of dark culture. And so this is allowing them to say, we're actually on your side. We want to help you reach your goals. And if you tell us anything that we can do to help you, we're there for you. It is quite, I mean, it's a, it reorients the whole idea of marketing. You know, it's no longer marketing to women, it's marketing for women. Where the brand is actually on the same side as you. No, no, but I mean, thank you. Thank you.