Translator: Johannes Duschner Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
When I was a boy in Poland under the Russian regime,
it was a little bit hard to imagine alternative futures.
It was straight off forbidden but we were kids.
We didn't care about that.
One day, we were watching the sky,
me and my friend just lying there.
What did we see? What do you see?
Just a black canvas, white dots, right?
But my friend, he actually saw something else.
He read a comic book, a foreign comic book, sci-fi book.
He saw alien civilizations, time travel, and all sorts of space adventures.
Maybe this was the first time I realized what a designer can do.
Someone with imagination that articulates something,
that you couldn't see before.
He gave me a whole toolbox to understand
what we could do as creative adventurers,
as humans.
This is maybe
why I became a designer later in my life,
imagining alternative futures.
I think this is important
because as my friend, Stellan Christianson,
also a designer, once said:
"We will spend the rest of our life in the future.
Maybe you should get it right."
I think the future comes in different sorts of ecosystems.
Ecosystems that we hopefully will want to live in.
Like owning a car that will be absolutely disrupted.
It will be a system similar to Spotify.
Mobility will be a service.
It will come ubiquitous.
It will be everywhere, maybe even for free.
We talked about energy earlier today.
It's a system of innovations that will change our lives forever.
I think we need to understand it because we are already doing it.
We have sensors today
that maybe can connect with interfaces to our brain
to transmit our feelings, our thoughts.
As a boy, I dreamed of science fiction.
It was great.
This summer I met Joel Sercel, very interesting guy.
He worked for NASA for 17 years.
Then he started his own.
He is building a machine. That's right.
That goes out in space, captures asteroids
and squeezes out of the asteroid, whatever can be rocket fuel,
with the help of solar beams.
That's a cool job. No?
It's not because it is cool. He has a grander, bigger idea.
He thinks that industrialization of space is already happening here.
We will have a railroad for space travel in our solar system, open to humanity.
So, we need gas stations.
This how he thinks this chain of designs will be a coherent design.
If you think about it, this is the stuff of Hollywood movies.
We see this movement from science ficton to science fact,
to design, to reality,
because once we sit down and start to imagine something,
and then articulate it in a way that we can understand it and see it,
we go for it.
But it's really, really hard.
Because change is, for the first, exponential,
so the opportunities and the difficulties are also exponential.
You and I, we already take decisions every day about stuff, about school,
and job and so on.
These decisions shape our future if you think about it.
Together as a sum they are bigger than just one decision.
Unfortunately, we don't realize it always.
We are somehow disconnected.
We move without this grander design of an experience,
we want to have in the future.
Maybe the future will just happen to us
in the worst case,
or maybe SpaceX or Google will make it,
or maybe the next US President
(Laughter)
will shape it alone.
We are a little bit lost and we hope that someone else will connect the dots
because we do imagine life that is good, decades from now.
The future.
But we cannot visualize it.
We cannot connect the dots alone.
I think you have seen it.
You probably in projects in school, in work, in your family,
where everything is running very fast in very different directions.
I once worked on a project,
where we tried to connect a really good pocket camera
with a really good mobile phone.
As he said I'm a little bit old-ish.
That's what we wanted to do.
We worked very hard.
The team started to bring in all sorts of innovations.
The biggest lens we could have.
Someone want to have a histogram in the display of the phone.
Do you know what a histogram is?
You do. Very few people do. It's so geeky.
In the end, it became a monster of features,
stacked on each other in a small tiny box
that couldn't take it.
So, we have to sit down again and rethink.
Okay, what is the question?
What is the human perspective of taking pictures?
What is the best camera in the world, really?
It's about sharing memories, right?
I experienced this, I want to save it, to cherish it and share it.
I want to capture that special moment.
The best camera in that moment is actually the one you have with you,
and that changed everyone's perception
in this project.
We started to figure out,
what would be the best mechanical and optical solution to put in a pocket;
to have it always there.
Make it really easy to open and fast.
We started to look at features how to connect the camera application
to the internet. Woah!
(Laughter)
Really crazy, because then we could blog directly from the camera.
We were first ones to do it, actually.
To think like the future user made us very, very sucessful.
We sold actually one phone every tenth second on the planet
for a very short while.
(Laughter)
Anyway, you could ask the same question today
with the mobile phones we have.
What is the best smartphone out there.
I guess, you have opinions.
I think it's the one that makes us smarter.
One that is not just a phone.
It builds a relationship to me as a human.
Leverages me.
Because that's what it is all about.
The next big thing is not a thing.
It's a relationship between these things.
We can imagine this relationship, imagine our behaviours
and the product will just follow.
Because it's all about empathy.
Empathy is a method
and it's the biggest tool a designer can have.
Luckily for all of us, we all have it.
We just have to practice it.
When we have empathy
we can understand the future needs of anyone, right?
That's the tool we have.
With that knowledge you can build future products.
So, basically, a good designer is someone
that can articulate and imagine desirable futures.
It may be simple like a nap or very complex like life on Mars.
I think we need to be sort of a fusionist;
bringing together science, art, technology, and design
to something that is coherent, that is tangible,
so we can make it desirable.
That's very important
because once we can conduct
and orchestrate the relationship of small pieces;
everyone working on their small advancement
into the future, a new innovation.
We can conduct and orchestrate them.
It's about this connection of the disconnected shapes
that the future will have.
It's up to us all to do this really, really well.
We need to start mapping the change around us.
We need to watching it and understanding it
because together all this changing will become our ultimate design brief
and we just started.
I have some thoughts about this dots or thoughts
that we need to connect together
that might help us on this journey.
John Maeda said once, he's a creative entrepreneur:
"I'm not here to fix pixels.
I'm here to find out
what is the biggest business impact design can have."
Because designers are trained in making something new
that has an impact.
For me, that's the best description of innovation I ever heard.
An innovation, as you know, is a huge business driver.
Design is a business strategic activity.
To put it on your board level
like many other companies have already done.
Venture capitalists, for example, hire designers.
We have big tech firms that already acquire whole design firms like Facebook.
Because they have understood they have to gain this creative confidence
to innovate well.
Speaking of creative confidence:
Anybody ever dreamt of being an artist, playing in a band,
but maybe didn't have this creative confidence?
It was one, two... Yes, half of you.
The rest of you probably play in a band, I guess.
(Laughter)
We lived in Poland and that wasn't sustainable in anyway,
so my parents fled to Sweden.
I was a teenager and I made a new friend.
I discovered rock'n'roll music,
free music, and punk rock was the best of them all.
You should listen more to punk rock, by the way.
So, Max had a band and he needed a guitar player
and he asked me, but I didn't feel I was the creative type.
He said, "No, no. It doesn't work like that."
Put a guitar in my lap and showed me three cords,
and he said, "When you hold these cords you can write any punk song.
It's going to be a hit."
So, I practiced,;I could barely play these three chords, right?
It was fun, we were friends, right?
I started to experiment.
I tried to stretch my fingers as far apart as I could on the flat board
and tried to see how that sounded.
It sounded terrible.
So, I asked, "Max, is this a cord?"
And he looks, "Yeah now it is."
We had this creative confidence between each other.
We really allowed us to fail, to learn from that and go again.
We had this culture.
Because when the world is ever-changing
we need to be ever-learning.
And that's the glue, that's the glue for your business strategy,
for you product strategy.
You can build your innovation team, or a design team, the best you want.
But design is not a department.
It's a culture.
So, you need to allow for this culture and support it.
You need to look for a creativity, empathy, learnability.
That's your new business intelligence
and you need to get everybody very, very involved; everybody.
Because design is too important to be left only to designers.
We need help.
We need help in all sorts of directions.
We have big problems: poverty, flying to space, diseases.
All this things need to be solved.
And I think we already have a piece of this help going on.
I call it a Humachine.
Basically, it's a symbiosis between us
- human creativity -
and machine intelligence.
When we combine it, which we do already,
when we run our companies, run our finances and logistics,
and all these things
that these machines make a little bit efficient.
They do it well and it's great.
It's going to be better and it's going to be automated.
Great!
Because then we can focus on making new software,
cognitive support,
intelligent support for human activities,
like storytelling, sharing experiences,
finding consensus.
The big problems need human creative solutions.
because creativity is not sitting and adjusting margins
in your Word document.
The creativity is writing a really nice love letter
or maybe a business contract if you want.
That's the real job to be done.
And we can move
from this analytical mechanical labour that we leave to the machines
to jobs worth doing.
We can move the political debate from
if peoples movement around the globe is good or bad,
because it's great.
We know that already, machines can tell us that.
There is statistics.
We can instead start to discuss how innovation is driven by globalization.
And it's activism. It's true activism.
We design artefacts like this one.
Artefacts shape our behaviour, right?
Behaviour shapes societies.
Societies shape politics.
Well, design is political.
Singapore already said:
"We want to be a design thinking nation."
The World Economic Forum is saying
that in the year 2020, which is quiet soon by the way,
the new work force best skill will be:
creativity.
And I bet you, not much, but a little bit, say ten bucks
that in ten years - I can bet more,
we can talk about that later,
In ten years we will have a politician, government level,
say, a minister of education with a strong design background.
Here in Germany, probably in Canada.
(Laughter)
Here is what I'm saying:
Let's map and connect our decisions.
Let's understand that change
because that's the shape of our future.
That's our design brief.
Let's be more rock'n'roll.
I mean, seriously, take chances, be bold
because that's how you fail and that's how you learn.
And that's how you innovate.
And allow technology to be more human for us.
Let technology do the labor of analytic stuff,
so we can focus on what really matters.
Creativity is a medium for all of us.
So let's map, build, and inspire a future that we really, really want to live in.
(Music)
(Applause)