Andrew Doherty - Designing future experiences exponentially

Thanks, thank you. Hey Nana! What you all don't know is my Nana actually has a little dog called Poochie and Poochie really likes chasing the cats and all you have to do to make it happen is do this. Poochie! Poochie! Where's the cat? Where's the cat? So right now, I'm going to teleport you to a virtual reality environment. My Nana's dog is going apeshit trying to find a cat that died three years ago. So she's got her hands full right now. So I make stuff that doesn't exist yet. In fact, I think we all do that as designers. We all make things that don't exist. Well, sometimes we make things that do exist a little bit better. But I didn't start out as a designer. I actually studied archaeology. And I wanted to be this artist. I was so obsessed with ancient civilizations and ancient technology and I really thought that this is what being an archaeologist was all about. But it turns out it's actually a lot more like this, which is sitting in a lab with a lot of really old people who know how to use this cool technology to measure sediment levels and the stratigraphy of the earth. But I did learn something really important when I was studying archaeology. And that is that one of the oldest designs in the world are these things, stone tools. In fact, they're about 3.3 million years old. And they don't happen by accident. They're designed. So some of the first designs that we learn about are those cave paintings from 50,000 years ago. But for a long time, a lot long time before, we were working with tools like these. And I think that design is actually the oldest profession of any kind. Sometimes you hear people say it's prostitute or doctor. But I would say that probably prostitution didn't happen until we had commerce. And doctors didn't happen until we had time to become specialists. And in terms of becoming specialists, all of the advancements in technology for stone tool making began in Africa. In fact, we can see this when we dig into the ground and we measure the depth of where we're finding these tools. And we find that all of the new technology with stone tools, began in Africa and then proliferated its way across the earth. No new advancement ever began anywhere else that we have found to date. And why is that happening? And it's because design happens not in a vacuum, but by leveraging the knowledge that we have before. By using the designs that we've already got, we make better designs. We make things better. We improve and we get moments of inspiration. This was a moment of inspiration. Somebody in Africa, 260,000 years ago, made this. And that's 200,000 years before the cave painting, which was pretty rudimentary. This is called the Levoli technique, which is where you smash a rock with another rock in a certain way to create these things called bulbs of percussion. When you do a number of those bulbs of percussion, you can actually slice off an entire shard of the rock and make a blade. And the blade is structurally very sound. In fact, it's so strong, they still exist today. You can find them all across the earth, in the ground. Sometimes they're laying on top of the earth. But this blade is a very specialized tool because it gave us the ability to do things physically that we couldn't do before. We could stab things faster and harder. We could make little ones and put them on the end of arrows and start killing animals at distances that we couldn't do before. This tool extended our physical capabilities. And it was the beginning, I believe, of us becoming us. Because this tool meant that we could store food. We could start killing things and keep it in a cave. We could start doing more things with crops that we couldn't do before because we were well nourished with protein sources. And that gave us more time. And when we have more time, we can become specialists in certain things, like being a doctor. Now we specialize in this. This is a new tool of today. I mean, it's still holding. We hold it in our hands. And it does things. Except it doesn't just extend our physical selves. It extends our mental self. So the stone gives me the ability to do things with my body. This gives me the ability to do things with my mind. And now, I mean, we saw some of the cool stuff with IKEA this morning. We've got so much connections happening with phones that we can access physical things in the real world. But this is an amazing mental extender. Now, I wanted to talk about mobiles. Because we're all mobile. We're all probably learning now or using now this strategy of mobile first. Has anyone heard of mobile first? Yeah? So I want to make the argument that we focus on mobile first not because it's the right thing to do, but because we're playing catch up. So I'm not sure. I mean, maybe you disagree. But I don't personally believe mobile first is the right thing. I'm not saying we should go back to desktop land. I don't think the tool should be the first thing that we focus on. Ingrid showed that she wanted to sew hers into her arm this morning. And I get it. I get it. Because I'm doing it too. I'm looking at my tool all the time. But I'm trying to make the argument that maybe that's not the best human way for it. Because it results in things like this. People sitting at cafes not talking to each other, not looking at each other, but immersed in these worlds with a tool that they have to hold with both hands sometimes. Especially if it's a new iPhone. You don't want to drop it. And it's slippery as hell. So you're holding this tool, walking down the street doing this. And I just, as a designer, I just don't think that's a good design. Tools should be invisible. A great tool is a pair of glasses. You put it on your head. It gives you a capability that you didn't have before. You see right through it. And it becomes invisible. You don't think about it. Sure, you can see it and look at it if you want. But mostly glasses are invisible. A book is a cool tool as well. It's actually a virtual reality tool. If you read the words in a book, you're able to teleport yourself into another world where you can sometimes even see, hear, smell and taste things with your imagination. But you don't lose your sense of periphery. You don't lose your capabilities outside of the tool. I'm worried about things like this with people. I've seen it happen. And I've almost done it myself. I've been immersed in this world sending a message to somebody, to my Nana, saying, don't forget the live stream, Nana. And I'm almost about to walk off of a cliff or like into a pole in China in a place called Chongqing, which is really cool. They have these phone lanes because people are killing themselves with these tools. I'm not joking. In Augsburg in Germany, they've installed traffic lights on the ground in front of tram lines to stop people from texting and walking into the tram because it happens. We don't spend the money on doing this unless people have died. So, you know, it's something that keeps me awake at night. I think it's bad design. And it was actually predicted by this really amazing designer slash engineer, a guy called Mark Weiser. I first heard about this dude by watching a TED talk by a lady called Amber Case, who's brilliant. She's an anthropologist. And she drew my attention to Mark. Mark wrote these papers about what the future was going to look like. And he wrote them in 1993. You know, when modems were still making that cool, funny noise that you used to have to put the pillow on to stop your parents from hearing you connect in the middle of the night while you got on IRC. At least that's my story. And he wrote these two papers, The Coming of Age of Calm Technology and The World is Not a Desktop. And they're really great. You should find them on the Internet. They're free. They're PDFs. You can download them. They're amazing. And they had three tips that I try to live by as a designer. And sometimes this puts me at loggerheads with other people. Maybe many of you in this room. And maybe business stakeholders as well. And I find myself constantly having to fight to try to make sure that whatever we design should take as little attention as possible. Now, when I hold my phone and I do this, that's the opposite of this. That's taking my full attention. It should inform us and create calm. How many of you have gotten so frustrated with your phone that you've wanted to throw it and then you remind yourself in the last moment that it cost a fortune and you shouldn't throw it? Or you have thrown it and put it on the bed really hard somewhere soft but you really threw it down there. That's because there are certain interactions that are happening on this device, whatever it is, and they're driving you mental. They're making you crazy because it's not doing what you want. It's not an invisible tool. It's a tool that takes your full attention and it lets you down. The last one is this. The right amount of technology is the minimum amount required to get the job done. And I firmly believe this. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. Now, I'm so glad that you showed the HoloLens video because I wanted to do the video but I couldn't figure out a way in Google Slides to get a whole video to play. So I have some screenshots of my biggest fear, which we just saw was a really cool thing. And this is the world becoming a desktop. Microsoft is very, very into Windows. They like Windows. And they like desktops. And this, to me, is something I'm really worried will happen. Mark foresaw it. It's happening now already. I don't think we're probably going to wear these massive contraptions in our apartments just so that we can see a low resolution version of Skype. But I do think that there will be some holograms coming in the future. And I want to make sure that as designers in this room, we're trying to think about what holograms are required and do we need the hologram of the weather in Maui while we're inside of our kitchen trying not to catch fire while we cook. So these for me are some of the examples of what I think is what I would almost call bad design. But it's not their fault. I'll tell you why it happens. But first, just a few more. My favorite is add to cart. By the time we get holograms, are we still going to be adding things to cart? I'm not sure. There's always graphs and pie charts whenever you see these examples. And because designers, we love graphs and pie charts. This one's my favorite. This is a Samsung window that lets you know the temperature outside. And inside or something. I look at this and I don't know if I'm going to turn the temperature up or I'm going to make the window go up. But I'm sure I'll find out as soon as I push my hologram. There's always these massive gestures that you have to do to try to get the graph to tell you what's happening in your life when really I'm sure you can figure it out. This one's really great. Alert. You're going to be in a really dangerous environment that requires an alert. And you're holding it in your hand. I would be running if it was me if I saw this. Oh, this is my favorite. This is from Iron Man. It takes a bit of time to understand what the hell is going on here. And that is bad design. If it means that I have to pay attention to it to understand it, I think that we can do better as designers. This is an Apple promo for all the apps that could be created in the world. I don't think that... I don't think that many of these things are needed to be stand-alone applications. I think if we think about the reasons that we look at devices, that we do give them our full attention, some of those reasons could be grouped into maybe four primary categories. Somebody wants me to do something for them. Hi, Andrew. Don't forget to... I want somebody to do something for me. Hey, mom, dad just reminded me not to forget to do this thing. Can you do it instead? And the third category would be gaming. Immersive type content. Videos and photos. Things that do actually require your full visual attention. The fourth category is one I'm a bit wishy-washy about because I'm not really sure how it works. But you could call it Facebook. Which is I really just want to distract myself. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just want to forget my miserable life. And scroll through photos of other people's amazing lives. I call that finding my own relevance. But mostly it ends with me being depressed watching Netflix and eating some M&M's. So I think that this is probably what we're going to end up with if we make the world a desktop. Which is just lots of little windows of screaming babies. Because each of these applications is like a baby. It requires your attention. They're not differentiating between I've got a nappy problem that you need to resolve or I have pneumonia. They're just screaming at you and they're all taking the same attention. So one example I like to use is there's a push notification on your phone that tells you, just letting you know, your cat died from somebody. And another one saying, just letting you know, you've got a new Tinder mat. And they're both taking up the same amount of importance on your display. In fact, if you go through your phone now, I'm sure most of you have a screen full of chock-a-block full of notifications. You don't even clear them or read them or know the difference between each one. I mean, is there any really OCD people who clear their notifications? No? One. Two. Okay, good. So Apple's, they're doing great. This isn't good design, in my opinion, and I might be wrong, but I try not to be wrong. We need to, what's the solution? I want to talk about the solution. So I'm done whinging. The solution is exponential design thinking. This is really hard to do. Exponential thinking is not something that we do naturally. We did not evolve to think exponentially. Our brains are linear structures. They work in a linear fashion. We learn linearly because we think, okay, the ox is running that fast. I've got to run this fast. And if I do that, I'll catch it, kill it, and eat it. We don't think, what if the ox speeds up? Or what if that hill makes the ox slow down? We just run and we think linearly. One of the examples that I like to use, which I stole from Ray Kurzweil about linear thinking, and I'll talk about Ray in a minute, he's my hero, is the rice story. Has anyone heard the rice story? Cool. Okay. So I'm going to do it really quick so that you guys, you too, don't get bored. The rice story is very simple. This traveling sage was traveling through India and met the king, King Raja. Who wanted to challenge him to a game of chess. Because the king had never been beaten. And this sage was actually Krishna, who was like super enlightened and was obviously very good at chess. So he's like, sure, I'll play you, but I want to win some rice. And the king's like, alright, I've got lots of rice. What do you want? How much? And he's like, well, I want one piece of rice on the first square of the chessboard. And I want you to double it for every square of the chessboard. And this way, at the end, I'll have a chunk of rice. And of course, the king's thinking about how much rice that is and visualizing a chessboard. So he's visualizing a pile of rice on top of the chessboard. I'm looking at my notes because this is a very big number. What we end up with is 700 billion tons of rice by the 64th square. That's so hard to imagine. That's two times the earth's surface of rice fields that Krishna won. And now in that town, I think they still have a tradition where you get free rice. Because the king owed the rice and could never pay his debt. But exponentials are everywhere. Another one is in your pocket. Your phone has integrated circuits. And Moore, Gordon Moore, predicted that integrated circuits would double in their capability every year and cost the same amount of money. And this is Moore's law. And he was right. And between 1971 and essentially now, we've been able to do this. Has anyone heard that Moore's law is not going to work or we're going to reach the end? I did. And it's because of the thing called a paradigm shift. So Moore's law works inside of another law, which is called the law of accelerating returns. Moore's law was about integrated circuits. But you can see that we have different kinds of circuits that began way back to the 1900s. Electromechanical, relay, vacuum, transistor, and integrated. The next is 3D molecular circuits that are self-organizing. Intel's making them right now. After that will be quantum computing. Google has a quantum computer already that is at 50 qubits, which I think I'm told is going to be a lot faster. I don't know how big that is, but it's very expensive. So it probably is really cool. This is called a paradigm shift. So I was talking about Moore's law. We're thinking in exponentials here. So each of these blocks is actually not just one more. It's ten times the one before it. And we can see that they do these things called nested S curves, which is a geek's way of saying, yeah, Moore's law is going to end. But don't worry. When it plateaus, it puts pressure on the next paradigm, which will then replace it. And that one will go on an exponential, and then on and on and on we go. Humans don't think linearly. We've been able to establish that. But I'm really excited to tell you about things that can think linearly, and that's robots or computers. They're really good at it. And there's another robot that's really good at it, and it's my hero, Ray. So Ray works for Google now. It's his first job. He started a few years ago. Larry Page read his book, The Singularity is Near, and rang him up and was like, how much money do you want to create the first AI? I've got a bit of cash. And Ray was like, that sounds good. I think we should do it. So he's now working at Google, and he's working for the DeepMind team, creating the first synthetic brain. And this guy's been thinking about synthetic brains his whole life, before when we had vacuum tubes, so he's pretty old. He also believes that he'll be able to cure death, so I think he's going to be okay. But this synthetic brain falls into the law of accelerating returns. These are Ray's graphs. I stole them from his website. Although he thinks exponentially, he doesn't think exponentially in terms of resolutions. So I had to make them really small so that they didn't pixelate too much. Because each one's about 400 pixels wide. But he shows that over different types of technology, the decrease in the size of technology, the ability for us to store data, the speed of the internet, the fastest possible connection, all forms of information technology fall into this. And we have to follow this law of accelerating returns. Which is that, whatever the technology, it will double within a year, and it will cost the same or less. In fact, the law of accelerating returns dictates that over 18 months, the law states that the technology will cost half as much. So we have an exponential increase in capability, and an exponential decrease in cost. Which leads us to AI. This book cost $2.7 billion. It's the most expensive book ever made. It's a physical printout of the human genome. Ray uses this example because it helps people understand the technology of exponential nature much easier than my rice story. And the way it works is, they, in 1990, got a funding of $2.7 billion. It was actually $3 billion. They came in under budget. They got funding to make the first human genome and map it. And it was really hard because we had never done it before. After seven years, they had only mapped 1% of the human genome. So the leading scientist in the world said, uh-oh, we failed, that's going to take 700 years. But the scientists in the program were like, dude, we're like halfway there. We've only got seven more doublings and then we're done. We're at 100%. And they were right. So they completed the project in 2003 and mapped the first genome at a price of $2.7 billion. Now it costs $1,000. If you want to get your genome mapped, it's $1,000. I think there's like four websites already that are offering this service. And it happens in like two weeks, so it's worth however many years that is, 14 years. Another one that I just wanted to quickly point out because I care about the environment is solar. This is a terrible picture. Solar is failing. We're going to die. We're relying on fossil fuels. The world is going to end unless we think exponentially. And we see that solar is actually doubling in its capacity to provide energy every year and reducing in costs. We're two years away from cost parity with fossil fuels and we're six doublings away from 100% energy efficiency in solar. I'm talking about exponentials for a reason. I know I'm a designer, but this is the reason. So Google is working with Ray to create the first synthetic brain which is increasing in its power exponentially because of the paradigm shifts in Moore's law and moving into integrated circuits that are 3D and self-organising. And it would have been too expensive four years ago, which is why I drew this really cool diagram just now. I'm going to show you money getting smaller, which means cheaper. Four years ago, we wouldn't have been able to do some of the cool stuff we can do today with Google's DeepMind. But we're transitioning into this magical, magical place. I don't know if any of you have children, but when children get really annoying, it's when they start asking, why? But why, Mummy? But why, Daddy? And this is the most important phase of a child's life because that's how it learns. And Google is now starting to ask why. It's not just what, it's why. And when it does that, it teaches itself, this DeepMind program, it teaches itself anything. It won the game of Go, which is the most, I think, complex board game in the history of mankind. In fact, there are so many different permutations of winning the game of Go that there aren't enough atoms in the universe. I read somewhere. So Google won the game Go. They can do things like upload a photo and it will tell you what's in the photo in natural language. Nobody was like, OK, if there's a thing that looks like a girl, it's a girl. If there's a thing with a shirt, it means T-shirt. There was no programming here. It happened by itself. What I really like about this is that the DeepMind program called the child a child because boys can wear pink too. So I wanted to give you a demo. You can do this demo yourself at home right now. But I wanted to show you how question answering, how advanced question answering is becoming. I'm going to turn my phone up. OK. What is the population of Sweden? The population of Sweden was 9.593 million in 2013. Australian accent. What about Stockholm? The population of Stockholm was 789,000 in 2007. How did you know? How do I get there? Stockholm, Sweden is 6 hours and 53 minutes from your location by car in light traffic. Here are your directions. She's pretty smart. What about flights? Flights from Copenhagen to Stockholm leaving the 29th of September and coming back the 3rd of October start at 916 Krona. The shortest flight is about 1 hour 10 minutes long. You can choose different travel dates on your screen. And what is the weather going to be like there tomorrow? Tomorrow's forecast for Stockholm is 18 degrees with showers. Pretty cool, right? That's happening right now. That's contextual understanding. I didn't just ask what. I asked what which led to a why. If we were to take this to the next level, we could imagine me saying to Google, hey Google, OK Google, why is my internet so slow? Or what's the speed of my internet? And then Google won't just tell me the speed, but will tell me why it's slow, where the problem is, and what I need to do about it. And I think that that's pretty cool. So I wanted to just quickly go on to this last topic of personalization and anticipation because this is where we're all going to lose our jobs. So now that Google is starting to understand why, it can try to understand why for me and for you, which means personalization. And when it can personalize the whys for me and you, it can start to anticipate more accurately what I want versus what you want. And at that point, it's able to do a lot more for us. So it's not just going to... I think there's a really horrible example with Siri where somebody said, hey Siri, I've just been abused. And Siri said, oh, everything's all right here. And another one's Facebook with the year in memory. There are so many parents who are writing to Facebook to say, and I know there's some Facebookers here, who are writing to Facebook to say, hey, you keep showing me photos of my dead child. Can you please remove them? So this is what happens when it's not personalized and it doesn't understand. But when it does start to understand you as a person, there's so much more that we can do. So I believe that if this is true, if personalization and understanding is something that an AI is capable of, we're going to enter into an era where design happens on a computer. An example might be that, rather than seeing this designer's version of a website for this product that I wanted to look into or find out about, I could see an AI version, an AI-created version, procedurally created, designed version of that website bespoke, created for me with the fonts that I like, the colors that I like, and the information that I need, not the information that you need. And as designers, we're kind of challenged because when we make a product at Google, I was making a product that's going to be used by a billion people. There's no user persona for that. There's like a user persona called everyone, or my grandma, who I ended up making it for her. She's a hacker. She goes by the name Cell-Nan, which stands for cellular nana. So there was a question earlier today when somebody asked, what about our jobs in 20 years? Am I going to lose my job as a designer? And I think if we think exponentially about the capability of technology, and we think exponentially about how fast this is going to grow and become capable, yeah, the jobs that we have today are in a bit of trouble. Especially if we're just dealing with pixel pushing, moving objects, buttons, flows, shopping carts. I think we're in trouble. But there's light at the end of the tunnel. This is a cool trend curve by Gartner, which explains all of the different technologies that are on the emerging market. VR and AR are way down here in the, yeah, we're now going to start buying this stuff, so don't worry. Your company's going to do great. So augmented reality and virtual reality But you can see on the Gartner trend curve, there are other things. 3D printing. Soon you're going to be able to 3D print clothes. There's a band already that has only 3D printed instruments. You can 3D print an aeroplane. These things will be downloadable, so you don't have to go to shops and go to the silly website for the shop. You can just download the file from a friend who sends it to you illegally. But there'll be legal purchases too. One of the examples that I love about this issue of illegal and legal is, I have. So I listen to free music, and then I buy things that I really want. And it's the same with free downloadable clothes. You're going to have the really cheap downloadable free version and then you'll have the ones that you really want. Oh, I'm running out of time? Okay, so I'm almost done. This is the last slide. So here are some jobs, and I don't have any time for questions, I don't think, if we run out. But these are some of the jobs that leading designers in our field have suggested that we should look into, and the one I'm really interested in is ethnographic designer and emotion designer. So people who are responsible for emotion, making us feel a certain way. We can't always be happy, we can't always be sad, we can't always just want to buy stuff. We need to go on a journey, we need to go on these journeys, and they need to be designed, because the robot's going to have real trouble figuring these out. Like, you're not allowed to point in the Philippines, it's really rude. So the robot might have lots of problems with, So that's the last slide. So imagine what doesn't exist yet. Now let's go make it before the robot does.