0:01 So hi, we’re from Idio, and we’re going to start out really broad by talking about emerging technology in the design process, and we are Jenna and Zoe. So I’m Jenna, and I’m managing director of Ideas Emerging Tech Lab and practice, and I actually started out in computational geometry, my first job was at KPF panying skyscrapers, writing genetic algorithms to make sure that we were complying with insulation requirements for residential buildings in China and all sorts of other exciting things. Today my remit is much broader, and so we’re going to be talking today about the design process in general.

Hi, I’m Zoe, I’m a software designer at ID, I have a background of computational AR architecture and computer science, so I’m currently doing more AI and emerging technology at Ideo. We have a beacon, it’s called Emerging Tech Lab, so we do all kind of experiment and how we bring our experiment day-to-day to our client project. I also have some background in the electric engineer, I was working at MIT HC research lab before.

1:19 All right, so what is Ideo, Idio is a global design and innovation firm, and it’s been around for quite a while, almost 45 years, and over that history we have made impacts in industries ranging from medicine to commercial products to the big tech firms, I’m actually also up to things as abstract as government policy, but through all of that our sort of reason for doing our work is to create a positive impact through design. And what do we think are the, what’s the way that that design happens, we think that you need to balance several concerns.

2:03 You need to be viable, you need to actually be creating and able to capture value in some meaningful way, you need to be desirable, and this is, I think, what IDE is most known for, trying to understand what people want, why they want it, how we can fulfill the underlying need that causes them to want what they do, what is responsible, so what are the potential consequences of the design choices that we’re making, and then what’s feasible, what’s possible. And we believe that good design lives at the intersection of all of these concerns, and the emerging technology practice in particular is very interested in what’s feasible, and what’s feasible, as we all know, is changing pretty rapidly, and we like to see this not as a constraint but as a place from which design grows.

3:02 And we have been exploring, again, over the whole of our history, what that intersection between technology and people really means for the world, and we are trying to build not just products or services but also the relationship between people and the tools that we use every day. And so today we’re going to talk a little bit about the design process, this is one way to diagram out a typical design process, there are many others, so we’re going to talk today about what happens when you’re trying to build empathy, to synthesize and understand what you’ve learned from that empathy, to build ideas off of that understanding, and then to express that understanding through prototyping, and finally to refine it into a functional and mature product, and we’ll start by talking about empathy.

4:00 So not all of Idea’s work is wonderfully visual, in fact this work is a a collaboration with the X.org, bringing together a bunch of experts from industry and also experts from the visually impaired community to define an an object model in XR that is accessible to visually impaired people. And so we had to do this really interesting thing of understanding sort of what tools and processes spoke to and were accessible to both industry and community members, and actually there was, there was quite a bit of overlap, because things like structure and and easy navigation are important both both to engineers and to people who need to use things like screen readers to understand the information in front of them.

4:51 It was also really important for us in this work to help the XRA itself learn more about the tech tecal development process, so we got to lean a little bit on some of our backgrounds as engineers to talk through what the life cycle of different forms of development were, so that they could better facilitate when to intervene in the process to make the most impact for for the communities that they were trying to uplift and serve. So things like this make us wonder, what bridges do we need to build to enable conversation across divides of both understanding and imagination.

5:31 Yeah, the next part I’m going to go through the syas siize part, so now we have the problem, now we have the our empathy towards one problem, and how we em, how we merge that emerging technology into the process is what we want to share here. So this is a project we done with a health care venture studio, and we try to design a digital dashboard on how to solve the problem of the health care issues in the rural American, so there’s our problem, find, define, that almost 76% of the land have a shortage of primary care physicians, so people in the R era mostly didn’t have the good access to the physicians and the R healthare.

6:13 So I’m going to show you the final result of what we designed, and I want to interpret how we use the emerging technology in the process and how we evaluate that exact. So our final result we designed is a provider facing a software that generate personalized report for the people living in the rural area, how we adapt to their language, culture, and context difference, and how we use this digital platform to help them to get access to the care more efficiently. So we design bunch of feat features like patient personalized interface and medical report generation with all these AI features, but how we get there, and how we use the AI or other emerging technology in the process to help us to proceed to the result.

6:51 To go through this process, we actually did a bunch of market research and user test and user interview together, we actually start with a very broad topic, the access to the rural house, and we kind of have more like multiple inspiration, including the rural community mindset, and how we get inspiration from multiple experts like the physicians and also the expert who U deep play into get accessibility for the health care for people living in the rural area. And then we done a bunch of research, but at the end we narrow down to the health literacy with the support of AI.

7:28 This is our process, we interview 10 stakeholders and 73 rural residents, we ask them the questions, and then we use AI tour to synthesize that, the entire process just costs four weeks, but how we evaluate that. So we use the framework of evaluating working with AI, so there are four criteria we use to define if this good tour to use in our design process, the novelty, the transform, transformative, in, inspirational, and unreliable, which this for framework help us to define if this tourus is right to use in our design process.

8:04 To give you a overview of what we did, so we make a matric of Matrix of the tours we’re using, like if we want to focus on the domain knowledge and research, if AI tours is really good to get that, for example, the novelty, we use the trity and the pelocity in the process, actually the result they give us the collection of the information context collected by AI, croud accurate at this moment, but we still need subject matter expert in the in the field to answer, ask the right question, because when you just ask broad question the chbt cannot give you the right answers.

8:40 To go through the process, for example, the symph asize and the in insight, we know that AI can persist large amount, large volume amount of data, so AI is really good at symph asiz the data we had in the entire process of interview, give a detailed information. We did a bunch of different, we did an entire documentation of how we collaborate with AI and emerging technology in the research and synthesize process, so there are some example like context awareness, we use Perplexity to help us synphase our user result. So when you get your user interview, when you get your market research, how can you embed AI in the process, and how can you accelerate the process, it’s here we want to share.

9:20 So there’s a question for you, by integrating AI into the design research, how might we balance human insight with AI data synthesize to ensure atic outcomes. So this is about symph asize, when we have all the information necessary, when we have the right question to ask, what we can do to ideate more ideas. So idea is a very interesting place, we do a lot of experiments dayto day, we use AI, we use XR, we also use engineering to help us imagine the future, to imagine the future in a fun way.

9:51 This a project we imagine the future of pant, what if we could embed AI and emotion into the ACT accessory you’re wearing, the outfit you’re having every day, this is a side project we did that called if this pants could talk. So we were thinking about how we can apply a fun idea into multiple domain and leverage AI as a power to help people customize their life and help us help people to more consciously living their life. So we build a pen spot that you can actually talk with pant about the things you can care about, think about you going to a store, you’re actually not buying the clothes itself, but also buy the things behind it, AI can be a really good channel to help you to answer this question.

10:33 Maybe people are curious about the C cultur contacts, or maybe people just want to ask how about the carbon footprint you have when producing this pants, so by answering this question, that by doing a fine-tuning, fine-tuning AI behind of it, we U able to share this with a client, that has shared this with the world about more themed AI in the content Tex. Another example is another fun way of play, so we know AI generate a lot of image, but how can we use that in the real case. So this is a project we did with FAL City Council and in Washington DC to help them to reimagine the city, so IDE decide to take 100 stakeholders through a futuring process to design the future of city.

11:20 So we host a workshop to help them to reimagine their day-to-day experience, but at the end how we make it more tangible, how we let people to know that the future is there, it actually helps because people talk a lot, but how we can re really reimagine that. So we use one thing called View Master, this is very vintage, everybody probably play around with it, so we generate a bunch of image through M journey and create image for the possible future and various different spaces for the DC. When people see these photos they get more inspired, we had more conversation going on, and we bring that insight into our design pers.

11:59 If you want to check more, here’s a QR code, but we’re also going to share it at the end, so here’s the question here about ideation, how does our relationship to the future change when we playfully explore emerging tech tours. Today, okay, so we have some ideas and we need to start to make them tangible and investigate questions we might have about them. So for this one we want to illustrate this with a collaboration Idio did about a year ago now, with with the the furniture company Moy, and it was a poetic home robot.

So we took inspiration from the world of automation and combine that with the world of dance, actually we built this these little macaronis as digital twins, and actually consulted with a robot choreographer to try to to really capture an emotional state and a personality into these four dancers who then performed in Italy. What what was really interesting to me about this work is how we took the strength of one kind of process, the efficiency and the precision of automated manufacturing, and used it to create delight, to create sensory experiences that are considered as as opposed to kind of being the the consequence of of a process.

13:39 And we did this through prototyping, shocking, it’s in the prototyping section, so there were many different kinds of mechanisms built, you know, starting out of coffee cups and eventually 3D printed irises, and then eventually, you know, full mockups of the the whole product. And by going through this iterative process we’re able to understand and express these sort of very experiential and feelings based goals through the the language and the processes of of automation. And if you would like to experience the macaroni for yourself, and unfortunately only if you have an Apple device, you can go to this QR code and see them in augmented reality.

14:24 Turn your phone off of silent if you would also like the accompanying audio, it’s it’s it’s pretty good, I I suggest doing so, so this makes us wonder, what do we learn about the possibilities for poetry when we take our materials seriously. For our final section of the design process we’re going to talk about refinement, and here we’re going to use an illustration from an edtech tool called Ethically, which is a tool to help connect students, teachers, and school systems through AI. So the idea for teachers is that you get support, although not a fully automated solution for correction, bringing your attention to the parts of a student piece of work that that need particular attention.

15:17 For students, it helps them overcome many of the common issues that students face when completing writing assignments, like the blank page problem, by creating a series of interactive exercises that bring them from their assignment all the way through to their their final, and for schools it is a way to standardize and proliferate standards and understand the performance of their students and teachers all in one spot. And the reason it’s in this section is because we actually built the intelligence engine behind this, we spent time not just on understanding from a base level what students and teachers and school systems were after, but then also building out proofs of concept with with the backing of the AI tools, and then taking those back out into the field and refining them live in in simulated classroom experiences.

16:16 And so for this we ask ourselves, how can we achieve greater depth in our design by interleaving building the core technology and defining the end user experience. I’ll hand it over to Zoe to conclude.

16:30 Yeah, so you already see all this different example from digital to physical, I’m going to share of some high level learnings we had through the process. So this is our very typical design process, but we embed the emerging technology into it, and we get some new learnings. The first one, the subject matter expertise is important to L lock potential of emerging technolog, few, we have this tech, but we are not doing this only for the tech, we need to solve the right problem, so find the expert to get into the domain, especially using AI, we find that we need to ask the right question to let AI to answer.

17:04 The second one is, don’t use emerging technology for the sake of trying out something cool, rather, rather use it for a purpose driven by a human needs. The third one is invest growing landscape or emerging technology tools, choosing the right one is a key, how we navigate ourself, how we use the evaluation system to define for our team. So the first example we showed in the health care venture showed that we kind of evaluate the tours, and then we deliver this tour kit to our team to use, so especially for the large team, how to define it, how to find a dedicated team to help you to navigate is very important.

17:39 So for all of this I do actually have a tour, we call it big question, so we help you to use AI to answer the right question of the problem you’re solving. So if you have a problem in your hand, you want to find the human needs behind of it, check the big question IDE here in your Google, and you you can find it and start to ask, answer, ask the right question to the future of emerging technolog. Thank you.