FEMALE SPEAKER: She is the lead designer
of Google Class, one of the products from Google X Group.
She joined the Glass team in 2011
when the prototype was still a phone attached to a scuba mask.
And she has since guided the team
to iterate towards the current minimalist design, which
looks really fashionable and has, I think,
been noticed by a lot of designers and awards.
Prior to joining Google, Isabelle worked at Fuseproject,
designing a wide variety of products ranging from the Nook
Color, Samsung televisions, to Swarovski exhibitions,
and eyewear for children in third world.
She has also designed several furniture exhibits,
which have been exhibited at Milan Furniture Fair.
Isabelle grew up in Sweden and was influenced early on
by Scandinavian minimalist design.
Her ultimate goal as a designer is
to make peoples' lives easier and more beautiful.
Sounds very familiar to [INAUDIBLE] mission too.
And without further ado, let's start
watching a video of Isabelle.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-OK.
So I'm going to engage the system.
[BEEP BEEP]
And now the car is in control.
I didn't even imagine that self-driving cars
would exist in my lifetime.
So to know that the technology exists,
and I get to work on it firsthand is pretty incredible.
-At Google X, we really take breakthrough technologies
and apply them in areas where we think
it could really transform the world.
-So part of it is moonshot thinking,
setting a really amazing goal that is really inspiring,
that could be possible, but feels almost
like science fiction.
-Well, especially at Google X, is first and foremost
the people.
-When I first heard about the job, I was thinking,
how would I fit in at Google X?
Coming here, I didn't feel odd at all,
because everybody's odd in their own way.
-So I came to Google X actually through a bit
of circuitous route.
I went to grad school and got my Ph.D.
In a field of nanophotonics.
So basically, I went from microphotonics
to nanophotonics.
-It's certainly common in companies
around here in Silicon Valley that the engineering workforce
is very largely male.
And maybe they have 10% women, or 20%, or something like that.
We'd like to get to 50% women.
-If we have just men and not women,
if we have just people of a particular race,
or just of a different particular background,
or from a particular country, that's
not going to be helpful, because we're not
going to think of the breakthrough things.
-It's by harnessing all this communal creativity,
if you will, that we're able to do what we do.
-What we're really looking for is passionate people
who love what they do and love to work
on high-impact projects that have a technology
angle to them.
-And you know, we make a little prototype,
and then you're like, yes.
Then I run around the entire office
and show it off to everybody.
And I'm like, oh, look at this.
This is so cool.
-I'm an optics person.
I'm a hardware engineer.
If you think that you're in this very narrow field
and there's no opportunity, and Google being mostly a software
company, you might be surprised like I was.
-I came to Google X fresh out of school.
I have friends that go to work, and it's just a job.
But here, this is so much more than that.
-This is where we were about one and a half years ago when
I first started.
It's literally a phone stuck next to your head.
Now, we are here.
-Knowing that when I come to work,
I'm doing something that's making history
definitely puts a smile on my face
and gets me excited to come to work every single day.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ISABELLE OLSSON: Hi, everybody.
Thank you for having me.
I'd like to talk a little bit today
about staying uncomfortable.
I think this is a good example of doing just that,
being in front of so many talented women in tech.
It's pretty incredible.
So I hope I have something that can inspire you.
I'm not really sure, but I'll do my best.
So I think, generally in life, we strive for comfort,
trying to finding the perfect home, or a perfect partner,
and trying to be really comfortable.
And I think in our careers and what
has helped me is to do the very opposite,
is to put yourself in situations where you are really, really
uncomfortable.
I think that pushes you to the next level.
And I think that's why I moved to San Francisco
about five years ago.
I had a great life in Sweden.
Bunch of friends, family were designing
for [INAUDIBLE], and exhibiting things,
and just having kind of an easy life.
So then I thought, I think I can have more impact than that.
And just so much exciting things going on in San Francisco,
so I thought, why don't I just try and go there?
Just drop everything, and move into a little shoebox,
and pay thousands of dollars that I didn't have, and just
not being able to speak the language properly,
and into a tech world.
I'm really not from tech.
I've always loved tinkering and building things.
But when I moved here, I didn't have a smartphone.
I hardly knew what a flat-screen TV was.
And all of a sudden, I was in this center of tech.
And I thought, what did I get myself into?
I'm crazy.
And I remember my first day at Fuseproject,
which was a design consultancy that I started working at.
And the project was to design the next-generation tablet,
and I'm like, what is a tablet?
[LAUGHTER]
I had no concept of it.
So I started to look for inspiration in things
that I love, things that, I think, make
life more beautiful, like furniture or jewelry,
and I pinned my little pictures up on the wall.
And then I looked around and I saw all the dude pictures,
and it was just full of computers.
There was just computers on the wall,
and then I had some rings and a little chair.
And I thought, gosh, this is really embarrassing right now.
I really don't know what I'm doing.
But the cool thing was that the art director was like,
take down all the computers.
This is where we're going and really taking inspiration
from something that is not familiar.
And that was the first moment since I moved here
when I realized is, it's good to be different,
and it's good to be uncomfortable.
So I worked there for a few years, and it was amazing,
and I was getting more and more comfortable.
Not good.
So when I got a call from Google, I thought, Google?
Do you make-- you don't make things.
It's on the computer, the stuff that I
don't know so much about.
But then she said, well, you know,
we're working on things like self-driving cars.
Self-driving cars?
She's like, yeah, you probably heard about it.
I was like, yeah, totally.
I definitely heard about that.
Not.
But I thought, OK, I'll take the meeting.
This is interesting.
Let's get a little uncomfortable.
And It definitely was.
I'm sure you've heard about the Google hiring process.
And you're stuck in a room for 10 hours straight and people
asking you really strange questions.
And I didn't meet one designer.
So I thought, what would I do here?
There were optical engineers, and mechanical engineers,
and UX people, and everybody except for "my kind."
And also the only woman, of course.
So I thought, yeah, yeah, I'll do this.
I'll take this job because it made me really uncomfortable.
Oh, and did I mention?
They wouldn't tell me what I was going to work on.
[LAUGHTER]
So you saw this in the video.
But on my first day, that's when I found out
what I was going to work on, and they showed me this.
And that was uncomfortable, not exactly what I was going for.
And I saw this, and it was a room full of software engineers
on their computers, and they were actually using this.
I don't know how really, and this is-- I can't even.
And I'm going to put it back in my Chanel box here.
But I got really excited about the vision
that was underlying around all this tech.
So my job was to, and this is, quote, my brief,
"make Glass comfortable and beautiful."
So I thought I could talk to you a little bit
about my approach in trying to do that.
Yeah, so this is what we see today.
Again, it's very early days.
It's Explorer Edition.
We're excited about where we came from
and where we are today.
But obviously, I'm already working on
like the v5 or something.
But it's pretty cool.
But it's sometimes-- and I need to remind myself too
because you kind of start getting like, things are not
getting smaller.
Why are we not getting further ahead?
And then I have to put on this prototype
and just walk around in the office and make people laugh.
So yeah.
So here's Joe.
He's my product engineer I'm working really closely with,
and this is a model.
So it's not a fair comparison really.
[LAUGHTER]
But for impact, it makes a lot of sense.
So I think when you're in this really, really uncomfortable
situation as you have this incredibly hard task,
someone is asking you to make something impossible basically.
Like, how would you make that comfortable and beautiful?
It just doesn't make sense.
So what I try to always do is set up design principles.
And I think even if I'm talking about design
in this specific case, I think it
applies to a lot of professions.
And it's really about setting out, what are the key goals?
What are the key goals that we always
have to filter a decision through,
because the messy process?
If you're trying to create something really amazing,
it's very, very hard to lose track
of what's really important.
Especially with technology, you continuously
want to add sensors, and battery life,
and all these things do to make it even better.
But in the process, you actually make the problem worse.
So in the case of Glass, my main design principle
was simplicity.
You see how it can be this complex thing.
And the thing is, people really don't
want to know what's going on on the inside.
People just want for it to work.
So we definitely had that as a main motto
throughout the process.
The second principle is lightness.
And I think it's not only about physical lightness
but visual lightness, too.
There was another early prototype, the black one
you see here, had the same components as Glass currently
does, but it looked really, really techie, and heavy,
and frightening.
So if you guys think Glass is frightening today, well,
now you see how it could have been.
And I think the last principle is scalability.
It's really important to, from the very beginning,
think about how is this going to evolve over time?
How can we anticipate issues that
are going to come along the way?
So in this case, you see the prescription glasses for Glass.
And it's the same technology, it's just the frame coming off,
and you can attach a different frame.
The second method that I'm using, which is quite obvious,
but I think it's something that we all could do even more.
I want to do it more.
And it's about visualizing your ideas, and in this case,
with prototypes.
Here is the snapshot of my desk, actually, a few months ago.
But it's an incredible tool, right,
when you were trying to push the envelope.
Instead of talking about things, glue things
together and don't be too fancy about it.
And then here you actually see an appearance model,
and it looks very, very similar to Glass.
But this is actually a non-functional model
that I created two and a half years ago.
And this is the Explorer Edition.
So it really shows if you set a high goal,
and if you inspire your teams with something concrete,
you can get there, even though it's hard along the way
and pretty uncomfortable.
And I think what I touched on before about scalability is
really important.
When you're trying to do really hard,
difficult things is to design for evolution.
Anticipate that things are not going to work out.
Think about ways that you, from the beginning,
can design in ways of evolving things over time.
So in the case of Glass, I mean, yes,
what you have seen is the core device,
but it's a whole ecosystem of other things
that we've now been able to create since we,
from the beginning, anticipated that one style doesn't fit all.
And this will just continue to evolve over time.
Yeah, and here you see Greg, one of the earliest
users of wearable technology.
He used to wear, not too long ago,
a huge backpack with a computer in it and cables
strapped all the way to his head.
But now he can wear his regular frames in Glass.
Yeah, and here's another example of how
we design something that could really be transformed.
So I think one of the things I'm the most excited
about, beyond just creating something that I didn't even
think we could do, is really how now everybody,
not everybody, but all of our Explorers
and how they're using the product.
And how inspiring that is to then go
after the next challenge of making this something
that could be for everybody.
So we have a lot of amazing Explorer stories,
and I just wanted to share a little snapshot
video of that today.
So if you can cue the video, please.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-My name is Andrew Vanden Heuvel.
-I'm Alex Blaszczuk.
-I'm Young Guru.
-I'm Bethanie Mattek-Sands.
-This is firefighter Patrick Jackson.
-Welcome to CERN.
We made it.
-What is a felling ax?
-What song is this?
-"Glass House."
-How long does it take a proton to travel the whole route?
-Are there bears in the Catskills?
-Show extraction diagram.
-Unveiling the new colors for Wimbledon.
-This is my get down time.
-Thank you, brother.
-Take a picture.
-I'll see you guys when I get back in Michigan.
-This is amazing.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
ISABELLE OLSSON: So that's all I have today.
And remember to stay uncomfortable.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]