Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Yi Hou
Change through participation,
imagine if you could make that happen;
Paul Bennett, our next speaker, is going to give us that.
(Applause)
(Arabic) Welcome!
OK, this is incredibly humbling
to be standing here in front of you all.
Let me just get rid of the hand, because it's going to bug me.
It's probably going to bug you as well.
This was my first view of you all,
48 hours ago, coming into Dubai, from the window of my plane.
I want to start with an anecdote about flying.
I read a brilliant article in a magazine a few years ago.
A pilot was interviewed and they said to him:
"How does a plane stay in the air?"
And he said:
— it was brilliant, very profound answer —
"It's got nothing to do with mechanics,
it's got nothing to do with hydraulics,
it's not a mechanical issue."
He said: "A plane stays in the air,
because everybody in the plane believes that it can."
(Laughter) (Applause)
And he said:
"Flying is nothing
but the collective suspension of disbelief,"
which I thought was genius.
And he said: "Usually, somebody in business class [goes]:
«How does this thing stay up here?» and it goes puah!"
(Laughter)
So, I talk to you today about the idea of —
— in our very turbulent times that we're all living in —
of resuspending our belief.
And one of themes that I'm very excited to talk about
is the idea of optimism,
because I think optimism is what we all need,
I think that design is a fundamentally optimistic profession,
and I want us all, I mean all of us, as designers in this room,
to start to talk about what we do, how we design the future together,
and how we do that optimistically.
So that's what I'd like to talk to you about this morning,
and I hope you will bear
with my somewhat stumbling Arabic translation,
but I wanted absolutely nobody to be exempt from this conversation.
So we've sacrificed design to make sure this was a truly bilingual presentation.
As Victor Hugo said:
"There is nothing like a dream to create the future."
Let's talk about dreaming, this is the theme of the conference,
and let's talk about the future.
As I said, and as the others have said as well,
I'm much more interested in what you do with this presentation,
or what you absorb over the next hours, than what I do.
I'm really excited, so far I've been here a few days,
had massive amounts of really exhilarating conversations,
and that's the point of this:
to have exhilarating conversations,
and for you, on Monday morning,
to take this stuff and start using it.
This is not about outsiders like me
coming in and giving you some kind of lame answer.
This is about people holding up a mirror and say:
"Here are some questions, let's all answer them together."
Design is a verb,
it's not some sort of thing that's applied to objects.
Design is a verb, and I like the idea
that design is the action that occurs between dreaming and being.
So you have dreams out here, very blue sky,
and you have the real world,
and what design does is it brings those two things together.
It's a series of actions and intentions,
that bring together dreaming and being.
So I'm going to show you, hopefully,
some inspiring examples of some of the stuff that we've done,
but more importantly,
what other people have done that we find inspiring,
and see what you guys think.
So as I said, I hate people that come into some other culture,
stand on stage and say: "Here I am, I got the answer."
I have no clue what the answer is.
I'm just here to listen
and to hopefully hold the mirrors so you can ask some questions,
and then let's all answer these things together.
We're just here to listen, learn, ask, facilitate, and meet.
I hope that's what that says.
By the way, myself and my colleagues have taken all these images ourselves,
so there's no crappy stock photography from some thing either,
because again that felt very inauthentic.
We've taken all these pictures ourselves,
with our iPhones, with our cameras,
just to give you our own impressions of what we're seeing through our eyes.
We believe that design is about change, that's why we are here.
This is Mirrored Camel, another big idea, I thought this was absolutely brilliant.
I loved the Mirrored Camel, absolutely awesome.
We believe that designers are optimists,
I fundamentally believe in optimism,
it's a very powerful tool in business, and in life,
therefore I'm talking to everybody here as designers.
And we believe design is about impact,
therefore, talking about the impact
of a room full of designers creating change,
— [is] a bit of a mouthful,
but that's what I believe we're in the process of doing here.
We're all designers thinking, so let's talk about what we do.
This is IDEO— a company I work for, and Design Thinking.
The first example is one I've shown before,
it's sort of a classic, it was on my last TED talk,
but it's still, in a nutshell, the best example,
it's my first personal example of getting into this kind of thinking.
Does anybody here work for McKenzie?
Good!
(Laughter)
Because I'm going to say really mean things about them, sorry.
We were hired by these guys at Minnesota Memorial Healthcare
to help them design the patient experience.
They had spent an enormous amount of money
— I can't say! —
trying to figure this out,
and received I think 749 pages that looked like this,
or looked like this.
And they asked us two questions,
"Is this good?" and "What do we do with it?"
So we went back a few weeks later
and presented this.
We created a seven-and-a-half-minute film
that we played completely straight-faced
and didn't explain what it was.
The president of the hospital wasn't terribly happy and said:
'How dare you? What on earth is this?"
This is Kristian Simsarian who works at IDEO.
This is what we did, we were an actual patient in the hospital,
which is what most people actually forget to do,
is to remember the human being.
We lay in a bed with a camera and we taped the roof,
because people forget that that's the point, right?
I was lucky enough to speak in Parliament in the UK
and I showed this example, and I said to the Parliament:
"Are you actually remembering to lie in the hospital bed of the UK
and are you looking at the ceiling?"
because so many organizations forget the person,
they're designing from the organization in,
and not from the human being out.
As we, Brits, would describe
blinding glimpse at the bleeding obvious
is in many cases what we do.
There it is.
What we did with this
— again, I'm not going to stand here
on a conference stage that has Design in it and say:
"Oh, my God, this is amazing design," it isn't; but —
— this is a horribly crappy picture, I apologise —
but with nurses, and patients, and doctors, and us,
we got together and we designed some tiny things
that could be done tomorrow to make the patient's experience better.
This is a tiny bicycle mirror,
that's glued onto a piece of cardboard, that's taped on to the gurney,
so that when you're being wheeled around,
you can have a conversation with somebody as if it was a rear-view mirror,
so that they can check that you're not dead
(Laughter)
—which was kind of a big idea.
The nurses, bless them, decided to decorate the ceiling,
because if you're going to spend all day staring at it,
it might as well be cute.
One of the patients had this idea
that it would be really nice, if his room over here,
looked like a room and not like the hospital corridor,
so a change of floor meant
that you were leaving common space and coming into his space.
Very simple psychological transition, but a very powerful one,
if you're lying in the room, not in the corridor.
And then, finally my last idea, my favourite bit of this,
— when you break your arm, and somebody writes on the cast,
or on the plaster, "I'm sorry you broke your arm,"
we put whiteboards from our offices in the hospital room.
So if you're asleep, your kid could come in and go:
"Here, mummy", blah-blah-blah,
and do a picture and "I'm sorry you're not well".
So again, not amazing examples of design, obviously,
but amazing examples of human empathy,
and that's much more interesting to me than design anyway.
So, you guys, you've all seen
our brainstormy jazz going on outside and on Facebook.
Before I came, as I said, I didn't want to stand here
and sort of tell you anything that was part of some big theory.
So we just put this up on Facebook:
"We're coming to talk at TED. What's your dream?"
We got a bunch of stuff,
and I've just got some more, from five minutes ago outside,
that I'm going to read you.
As you would imagine,
it's a sort of contradictory, intelligent, lovely conversation,
— and one that's just the beginning—
of some quite contradictory things.
"Dubai has the opportunity to be
the central hub for innovation and knowledge."
That's fantastic.
"My dream for Dubai is that it develops into a cultural bridge."
"My dream for Dubai is that the population finds something other than consumerism,"
that's a theme we've heard many times.
"Can it be the place for creative people to come, live, and be inspired
to create art and not only to work?
I love this: "We learn to love finding out more than knowing."
Ayasha, are you here?
Awesome! Double snaps to you, brilliant.
Oh, who's he?
"That we move beyond scale into substance."
That's again a part of this conversation,
it's a co-creation conversation that everybody can [have] here.
Some that came this morning, from post-it notes:
"What's your dream for Dubai?" "That we make it happen now."
"That it becomes the creative capital of the world."
"That we develop people and not just property."
This is an Arabic one which I had translated,
"The cleanest environment ever."
Another one in Arabic, "Human before place."
Finally, "Open source Dubai."
Last one, "Education for everyone."
So again, not pretending to have an answer,
but the conversation is beginning, we're all here doing it,
let's continue with that stuff.
So, what are we going to do?
I think what's rising to the surface is one big question.
And this is it: how will countries be designed in the future?
Will they be designed around happiness, for example?
Like Bhutan, they have Gross National Happiness
through which they measure everything.
Will they be designed around contribution?
If you look at what Estonia is doing,
there, everyone's about the culture of contribution.
Will it be around quality of life like Switzerland is doing?
Will it be around innovation like Denmark is,
– we're actually talking to Denmark
about helping them become an innovation country.
As we've been hearing all morning,
will it be about the new kinds of modes of governance
things like Facebook which are interconnected and interdependent?
And most importantly, — love this picture by the way —
will they be designed for us or will they be designed by us?
That is a very important point for the people in this room.
We are the designers.
Lots of heads nodding, that's a good sign.
I'm very hopeful that the answer is yes to all of those questions,
not one versus the other, but it's all of them,
that Dubai becomes an amalgam of the best of all of these things.
I am actually pleasantly surprised, and excited, it's very optimistic here
— I keep using this word, I was on radio the other day and I said:
"It feels like the land of optimism here."
It's very brave, it's very big.
It's very brave, I don't think that's necessarily bad.
Many cities look for ways to make the most of limited resources.
But Dubai was the first city to ask the following question:
"What could we achieve by bringing the world's best brands,
technologies, designs, and talent together in one place?"
As a result of that, you've got amazing benchmarks
for luxury, for service, for infrastructure, for economic growth.
But, one could argue that these can be surpassed at global market.
I actually firmly believe, — and this is my big point —
that you have created here one resource that is absolutely impossible to imitate,
which is that dreaming is big here.
Dreaming is big business.
Some of you guys are professional strength dreamers.
And I think there's an opportunity here
where that sense of opportunity is absolutely endless,
and I would encourage you to take that by the horns and run with it.
And, I think coupled with resident talent,
that's an extremely powerful idea, and what can you do with it.
Loving the Wild Peter guys. The Wild Peter guys are here, right?
Where are they?
Yay, there you are. Loving them, brilliant!
Great example, they're going to be talking later about reinventing.
Is it the "shawarma"? Sorry if I said that wrong and I probably did,
fantastically reinventing an iconic piece of food.
You guys have spent years learning from the world's best.
Now how do you turn that knowledge into a 'made in Dubai' sense,
rather than an 'imported into Dubai'?
So I think locally grown,
and again, people in this room will be very powerful for that.
So, could you guys
— my final last slide before James comes and does Julia Roberts at the Oscars
and kicks me offstage for overstaying my speech—
could you guys, become the catalyst
for linking dreaming and being?
So are you the link between dream and be?
It may be worth exploring how you can coalesce everybody,
the politicians...
Oh, is that IDEO talking to Obama?
How self-publicizing of me, I would never dream of doing that.
We've been talking to the Obama administration
about helping them understand how to innovate.
So, I think, again, this process is not just post-it notes.
This process is how the future is starting to occur again and again.
And of course I would urge people in local communities.
I think this is a time we're local, and that's why I'm so excited to be here,
I came here deliberately for that reason,
because I thought it was time to drop that TED level of thought leadership
into local communities,
because I think this is where it's going to start to really hit the road.
It's very exciting that these guys invited me,
because I think bringing them into local communities
is the next iteration of this work.
So I would suggest that you go out there,
and cocreate, and prototype cardboard futures for yourselves.
This is one of our designers making a camper van out of cardboard,
and as you can see that's core to what we do.
As design is increasingly becoming a tool for social change,
it's this idea of going very, very big, and then manifesting it locally,
that is going to really be about the future.
So, that's kind of it.
I hope my Arabic speaking friends are going to cut me some slack here
and that I didn't say anything too blasphemous or offensive.
I hope that this was helpful, I want this to be useful.
I'm really interested in the idea of action coming out of this.
Not just "Wasn't that cool?" but "Here is what I'm going to do about it."
So I'm going to encourage you
— there is this brainstorming stuff going on outside —
to participate in that conversation on your way to lunch,
just throw a post-it, we are going to capture all of those
and then we'll feed them back to this crowd,
and we'll going to continue this conversation on Facebook.
Last couple of slides, and if you take nothing from this, take this one:
"Be fundamentally collaborative,
across all various strata and disciplines and races,"
"Think prototype" and "Make this a local conversation."
And keep being brave,
because that is all about here, I think.
Now, get out there and design!
Thank you.
(Applause)