Surya Vanka
Wielding the Transformative Power of Design
In this episode of Brave UX, Surya Vanka brings his hallmark energy to this conversation about the power of design, the challenges the field faces, and how he’s using Design Swarms to ignite creativity.
Highlights include:
- Why is your mission, “to unleash the design thinker in every person”?
- How is the democratisation of design helping and hurting the field?
- What can seasoned designers learn from design’s growth?
- What is keeping people’s creativity leashed?
- Why is inclusive design important?
Who is Surya Vanka?
Surya is a design innovator with over 25 years of hands-on experience bringing the design of physical and digital products to life. And through Authentic Design, the studio he founded in 2014, he is on a mission to unlock the creative potential of everyone on the planet.
One of the ways Surya is doing that is through Design Swarms - a democratic design approach - used by organisations like the Clinton Global Initiative, the United Nations, and Global Humanitarian Lab, to help tackle a variety of wicked problems, including the Opioid Epidemic, Domestic Violence, Water Borne Diseases, Digital Equity, and Ocean Pollution.
Before founding Authentic Design, Surya was a Director of User Experience at Microsoft, based at the Redmond campus. There, he led multiple design teams, including the enterprise-wide design excellence team, and was a key contributor to Microsoft’s experience-led renewal.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Surya Vanka. Surya is a design innovator with over 25 years of hands-on experience bringing the design of physical and digital products to life through Authentic Design, the studio he founded in 2014. Surya is on a mission to unlock the creative potential of every individual community and organization. And one of the ways he's doing that is through something that he invented - Design swarms.
- Design swarms are a democratic design thinking based approach that enables all people to contribute value to the design process, no matter their background or level of design experience. And they've been used by organizations like the Clinton Global Initiative, the United Nations and Global Humanitarian Lab, to help tackle a variety of wicked problems, including the opioid epidemic, domestic violence, waterborne diseases, digital equity, and ocean pollution. Before founding authentic design, Surya was the Director of User Experience at Microsoft, based at the Redmond campus. There he led multiple design teams, including the enterprise-wide Design Excellence team, and he was a key contributor to Microsoft's experience led renewal. Over the 16 years that Surya invested at Microsoft, he was able to influence the design of products and services used by billions of people. And now, as fate would have it, he's here with just one other person today, me, on Brave UX. Surya, welcome to the show.
- Surya Vanka:
- Brendan, what a pleasure. After that introduction, that is lovely. What a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a real pleasure to have you here, Surya. And as I was saying before we jumped on, I really enjoyed watching your previous talks, the level of insight and energy that you've brought to the design community. It's such a joy to have you on the show. I understand that you grew up in India, but as part of my prep, I didn't discover you speaking much about your time in India before you came to the United States. All I could really find was that you had studied in the 1980s, about five and a half years in industrial and product design at what's called the National Institute of Design in Gujarat, which again, I understand as India's premier and first design school. What was it that led you as a young person in India growing up to want to pursue a career in industrial and product design?
- Surya Vanka:
- So I think studying design and discovering that design school in India that you mentioned, the National Institute of Design at Ambu was probably one of the luckiest things that ever happened in my whole life. So the time I was studying in India, because I was finishing school and so on, I knew from an early age that I was a tinkerer, I was a maker, I was drawing, I was doing all these things, but this was my hobby and I didn't know that there was actually people who got paid for this. And there's even a discipline that had a name called Design. Now, after all these years, one of the joys of my life is that I've had this amazing opportunity to have taught at some of the best design schools around the world. And when I think back at that time at the National Institute of Design in Gujarat, I'm so thankful that's launched me into this journey.
- So as an 18 year old, I remember I was lost, I was in engineering school, I didn't quite fit with everything else I did. Later on my career, I've gone deep into engineering. I've written books and engineering, I've written a book on materials and manufacturing. But at that point, for some reason it was just not connecting with me. And when I accidentally came across this tiny school that just a dozen students across all of India and discovered it, what happened from me was I realized that this thing that I had been following as a tinker, as a maker drawing was this confluence of these two things. I didn't know the language say that, but the confluence of two things, which was making things that had a human connection and making things that are creative, really the two centers of gravity of design being human-centered and being innovative and going to this school, it really gave me this opportunity.
- And at this point, this was a privilege to go to design school in India at that point, because this was almost the very start of the design profession in India. The founders of design in India were my teachers. And so we were very, very early in the conversation where there was no difference between student and teacher. We were learning together. And so it was just such a privilege to have started the journey in that way. And the one thing for me that it taught me, I think, is the whole idea of learning to learn. And it serves me very well at this particular moment in design when we are reinventing design altogether. And those same skills I learned as an 18 year old who went to that school to want to design fast cars but ended up going, doing something entirely different have served me well all these years later.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I wanna go maybe even a little bit further back in time. You've talked about being the 18 year old wanting to design these fast cars that you recognize that you were a maker in the past. I've also heard yourself describe as a curious person, which probably won't surprise anybody, given the nature of what you do and the type of people that are listening to this podcast, what is it though that you ascribed this intense curiosity to, so before you even found design, what is your earliest memory or what is it in your background that mm-hmm really created the environment for you to develop and think and act and make in the way in which you
- Surya Vanka:
- Have? Oh my God, that's a brilliant question. That's a brilliant question. I may not have asked quite a brilliant answer, but I'll look at it a little bit. I remember some earliest memories of my designs or my tendency towards being this particular kind of human who is a designer, this thing that we call design, this unusual thing that we call design. For me, the core of design of course, is that we are all creative, we're all creative, and we all have something to offer. It kind of spurts out of us in different ways. But then enter stage left is this particular thing called design. And this is now systematic method by which we can take that raw human creativity turn into results. So if I think back on my own childhood, I remember all of those notebooks in India, we used to call them exercise books.
- The notebooks that I had the front would begin with the homework I had to do assigned by my teachers. But from the back I would be drawing pictures where I'd be continuously trying to refine the same picture over and over and over again. And typically what would happen is the picture, half of the notebook coming from the back would meet the homework half, two-thirds of the way. So there's only be a third of the notebook left for the homework. But I bring it up because I think without having the language, without knowing what it was, and really to the consternation of my parents and my teachers and so on, what I was doing was really one of the core things that we do in design, experiment, and iterate. And so for me, that early experience that through this particular thing that we experiment and iterate and try solve something.
- And that solving we use often in design we use visuality, right? And so if I think about were those things, the other thing that I think as a young person, I think oftentimes the clues you get about yourself are what others notice about you. And the things that people noticed about me, whether my family, my friends, was that they appeared to be a quirky different way of thinking this guy had, there was something, those things that seemed to be taken for granted by most people as sort of just the nature of the built environment and the way we are. For some reason, something made me want to poke at that, whether it was door handles, whether it was toys, whatever it was. So there was this notion, and I think that is actually closely connected with what I was doing in those drawings and scribblings the things that are I was constantly getting messages of, you know, really wasting your time doing that. The productive work starts in the beginning of the notebook. So for me, those were the interesting. I also, when I was in school, I remember I was winning the art prizes. So for a while I thought maybe I'm an artist. But then again, being a middle class Indian, being an artist is a hobby. It's not a location, certainly not something that pointed forwards towards sort of a livelihood and sort of a vocation where you'd make income. Right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, that's interesting. That's interesting cuz you mentioned engineering when we first started talking and how that you hadn't yet discovered design and engineering wasn't really firing for you at that stage of life. You also mentioned just a second ago that in pursuing the artistic endeavors in your textbooks, you were told that you were wasting your time. Now this is symptomatic of a education culture and industrialized culture that clearly seems to value engineering over design. If you look at the waiting in terms of designers to engineers, even in tech and products, there's probably some other really complicate complicated and good reasons for that as well. But what was it within you that you listened to that input from the world, whether it was from people like teachers or parents, I'm not sure you tell me, but what was it that you had within you that you decided to ignore that and carve your own path?
- Surya Vanka:
- So for me answer's a very interesting one. I've studied engineering at a college in a place called cdi, this college, Chandi City, which incidentally is designed by Lake Corbusier. It's an entire city. Back in the sixties, the prime minister of India then Jar Nero, who was sort of a modernist and was very keen to take, put this post-colonial country that had had been at a standstill almost for about several hundred years, where it hadn't actually progressed in terms of its own modernity. And he wanted to bring in influences of modernity in different ways to the country. And one of those things that he did was to invite the person he thought was the preeminent architect in the world, corbu to come and design an entire city. So do the master plan of the city and some of the significant buildings and so on.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just a small job,
- Surya Vanka:
- I know, just a small job. And so of course I could go on about this city. And this city was a modernist city, which divided into, I think it was 42 sectors. They were called sectors. Each sector had a number. I know we lived in sector 34, each sector was divide to four parts, a, B, C, V. We lived in sector 34 D. So kind of dystopian in.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like something out of some sort of Soviet dystopian I know, right? Fiction. Yeah,
- Surya Vanka:
- Exactly. And the college that I went to was in sector 11 B, but in this college, in the section of the engineering school, which also was section E, so you can see this is such layers on this had a window. And that window when I was having trouble going through my classes in differential calculus and everything, I was trying to figure out what, this is very interesting things, but I don't see how this connects with real life. And I remember I had look out of this window, outside this window was this building, this colorful heroic building, a coria building [inaudible] building off the state capital because this is also the capital of the state. And I remember that building got me more and more curious about why did this building take this unusual shape, almost like this bird with wings. It had orange and red columns and it had this very unique shapes.
- And so that drew me to go investigate how did this building come to be this, it looked different from every other building. And there began a journey to understand, because there was a room where there was some of the models that CorpU had made, and it was a same thing, a mirror of myself, exactly those things that I'd been doing in my notebooks. Here was this famous person who actually built this huge building outta concrete, but it's sort of in his notebooks. He'd been making these little drawings and pictures that didn't look that different from mine. And this was a real profession. People actually did this. This was not that. These things didn't come as a hobby. Rich people didn't do this as a hobby. There's actually people who did this for a living. And so they started a really investigation. So there's something called architecture.
- And so there was one school which also taught architecture. And so I went down the rabbit hole saying, so how did I get into that school? And then it turned out that by sheer luck, that school was in the same city, Emma, above that the design school was in. And by Sherlock, my dad happened to notice an advertisement on page 16 of the Indian Express in one oh Lucky Corner saying there is this thing called design school accepting applications. And my dad was, he's the military. And his experience of me watching me grow up and what he did, he got this spidey sense that this son of his was onto something. It is different from what he was doing, but it's different at some point. He was telling me those things. We see those Disney cartoons, I think you are meant to be doing things like that.
- Now there's also the vaccine problem. How do you reconcile that with having a vocation and having a profession and all of those kinds of things. But he saw and said, you should really look into that. And so I did. I looked at that had I knew it, I funny knew, okay, there it is. I knew it was there. I always knew this existed and there it was. So even before I knew there's only a, and there were about 20 places that year and in that school, but look at the ad, I just knew that's me. And there opens a new chapter in my life. I just had this great sense of certainty and that's how that came to be. But it was thank you to the boring differential calculus textbook and that window which led me through this particular unique journey. Now when I say it, I think people who have this sensation that I'm describing, that I discovered this thing called design.
- And this is so special and unique to me because now something very interesting has happened to me in my life. We tend to construct the world as there is this thing called work, and the work thing is a thing that you do to make money. And then there's this other thing about the things that you enjoy and you use the work thing to make money, to do the things you enjoy. And there is, when people discover design and they have this feeling, they say, how can this possibly be true? Yes, that this same thing that I truly enjoy doing so much is also this thing that is a profession and it's work. And it's that moment where I think it's a very deep awakening, almost recognized that is you don't have to operate your life as sort of fragmented into these two parts. They come together as one. And for me, that has, that's why I say luckiest thing that happened to me. And I know I'm not unique in that A lot of people have that experience and that has continued through all these years, that same sensation of I mean, every week, I think so lucky to be a designer. So lucky
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You feel like you might be hiding something sometimes you're like, it can't be. It is good. It's really good. Do other people know?
- Surya Vanka:
- Exactly. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I just wanna come back to your dad though. I, I know that's just a small snippet into what life was like for you and your relationship there with your father. I mean, someone who came from military background and which is obviously a fairly disciplined pursuit in terms of a career, but that belief, the belief of a parent and a child when they can see that the world around them isn't suited to where they want to go, what a special thing
- Surya Vanka:
- It is. And I'm really loving our conversation because this is worth looking at because again, it comes back to this core idea. So my dad was in military for a long time because brigade general was successful, did all the kinds of things in the military, but incredibly inventive person. There's always things that he do even within the structure of the military that he do in these very clever, creative ways. And he is known for his kindness and he is also known for his creativity. So this thing called creativity, although we are designers, we are talking in a conversation that's about design, which may be listened to by a lot of folks in design. But we don't have a corner on creativity.
- Every human being is creative. We will fortunate enough to get the formula to be able to be repeatedly be creative on demand, wake me up at 2:00 AM in the morning and tell me to be creative. I can be creative because I love the secret formula called design process. But everybody is creative. Most humans don't get a chance to really turn that into value, into social value. They might turn it into certain value in their own lives, such as the way maybe they arrange their forks and spoons, the curtains they pick for their homes or the way they decorate their desks. But in terms of broad social value for everybody that requires this kind of rigorous process, the one that we are so fortunate to be trained in,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've heard you describe your mission Surya as, and I'm going to quote you now to unleash the design thinker in every person to become a value creator. And I believe this is underpinned by a belief that you hold, which is that all lives are created equal. And you've sort of touched on just before how you believe every person is innately creative, which is what you've just been talking about. Why do you in particular want or have this need to unleash design thinking for everyone? And what does it mean for people to be value creators as they go through that process?
- Surya Vanka:
- This is something I do ask myself because if I look at my own journey as a designer, so my own journey has been a lot about exploring my own creative self, creating these products first versus industrial designs, create, creating these products made of injection molded plastic and glass and metal for automotive industry and for consumer product and all of these various kind of products. And I was fortunate these products did well. I got recognized and it was great to have that career as an industrial designer to do that. And at some point I shifted to the world of digital. And for me the shift was actually honestly not that great. It meant learning a new craft.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I wanna just tell people a bit of context here because what people might not have picked up, and I didn't include it in your introduction, is that you were a tenured professor and you decided to leave tenure behind and completely. And this is a hugely brave, brave act, completely change design discipline. So I just wanted to give people that extra context. So it wasn't like you were sort of fresh out of university and walking into this industry. You made a conscious decision to leave academia behind.
- Surya Vanka:
- I did. And maybe we'll come back to that. I have in some ways it has turned out not to be leaving it behind, but in a sense, changing my relationship with academia in a different way. But we can come back to that. Sure. So the shift from physical product to digital product, for me that was a it'll simply change the material moving from plastic and metal and glass to algorithms and data and pixels and so on. The process remains somewhat the same and the process actually remains the same. The craft itself did change. So there was a part where I went through this journey of being a maker in the physical world and then a maker in the digital world. But one of the things that I have noticed within myself is, and we are drawn to different things, all of us, and one of the things that seems to bring me joy and satisfaction is to coach and lead and help and teach and all of those things, which is what led me to being a professor, which I did for seven years.
- I continued to teach and then when I work, I was working in corporate, I would do a lot of that in my own teams. And then that mission expanded to actually doing that for the entire company, in this case Microsoft of leading coaching. So in some sense there has been this thread that has been running through, which is this one, making and unleashing my own creative self and then getting a lot of satisfaction and pleasure of unleashing that from others of that within others as well. So just did a very emotional level that brings joy to now also, whether it is being a manager of large teams, being a teacher, being a coach, and so on. One of the things that I think I kind of feel is a waste is when somebody's innate, creative capabilities don't get to flourish, don't actually, they're capable of so much, but they miss a piece.
- And so they're not able to actually take it and turn that into something that sticks, something that actually gets realized in the world. And so for me, what I've learned through teaching of being an instructional designer of I went deep into human performance technology at some point to really understand how humans take and how to motivate and get that out and of people to understand behaviors and understanding how you actually shape those. So for me, this whole notion of this mission of unleashing the design, think of any in everyone, to be a value creator is also a design project. It's a design project. And I approach it in very visual ways. I approach it in very experimental ways. I always begin in empathic ways. So it is not about, let's say giving up, designing myself and teaching others to design. This is my most challenging, most interesting design project that I've ever done.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's goes to show that you can be both generous and selfish at the same time.
- Surya Vanka:
- I think so. I think so. I really do think so. I think, again, this gets to some of the categories we create in the world of are you going to pursue a path of profit or purpose? No, I think there is room, there's plenty of room in a complex complicated world, so much in need of tending to, of regenerating you can follow create career paths, life paths that bring together passion, purpose, and profit. Those don't pull away in different ways. I try to remember Victor PK and his book designed for the Real World, which is more than 50 years old now, but I keep going back to it. But he begins that to book by talking about the dark path that design can take. I think you started by saying marketing's the most dangerous profession, but design is the second most dangerous profession by creating grown up men and women creating idiotic things that nobody needs and sell them to them by tricking them into wanting them. So that's a dark path, which I think has lost purpose and just has followed only that profit motive. But I think there's plenty of room really, as you saw wonderfully said there is a lot of room to be generous and to do the right thing for yourself and for others.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And if we've been guilty of anything in recent times and generalizing here about humanity, it's being too binary in our thinking, which can lead to some fairly abhorrent behaviors and also someone unhelpful ways of framing the world as individuals. And the choices that we make. I wouldn't come back to this word that you used in your mission, if I may. Mm-hmm. Unleashed. Yes. And why I wanna focus on that word is there's a converse to that word, which is leashed. So if we need to unleash people to realize they're in a design thinker and really realize that creativity, what is it? It may be more than one thing, but what is it that is keeping us leashed?
- Surya Vanka:
- So I think the world that comes up for me right away is courage. And I think a lot about creative courage. When I teach design, I try to teach creative courage and taking risks really kind of truly without being cliche, being joyful with failure. And I think a lot of that is really these we talked about earlier in our conversation, these kind of constructs we have in the world, work and play, profit and purpose. These things are framed as an opposition to each other. Similarly, the whole idea of yes, I wanna go do this hard job that I hate doing and then I'll go back at home. But in one corner of my garage I have my easel and my paints and I'm learning a watercolor class on YouTube. And that's where I will unleash my creativity. While the need of the moment and the opportunity of the moment is really to take that creative self and unleash it on the million problems that we have in the world right now.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, we've got a few, we
- Surya Vanka:
- Do, we have and have millions of problems on planet earth and our societies, but we have 8 billion humans. That's 8 billion creative minds. So that's a lot of creative minds. So you know, asked me earlier, what draws me to this, I think today the biggest waste that we have on the planet within every organization is this creative capital that doesn't get used and ins to gets locked into people who are not happy in what they do. And we are with humans, a lot of humans doing jobs and machines do and not be able to do those things that humans do well, which is their creativity.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And if there was ever a worthy design challenge, it would be to free humans from menial labor. And I mean, I don't know enough about the trajectory that we're on, but it certainly seems with automation that that's coming. I know some people have some fears about job displacement as a result of technology and that's again, not something that I'm really qualified to speak on. So I wanna just dive into something slightly different and happy to come back to that if you'd like to though. So
- Surya Vanka:
- With very, very good reason at this moment in time, we should be wary of technology. We should be wary of some of these technologies that have become so surveillance technology that tends to, even though I said humans doing jobs, machines should do the people being displaced from their livelihood. So there's a lot of ferment, there's a lot of stuff that is not going. The potential exists if we get really smart to use these technologies in ways that are aligned to the creativity humans. If the mission is to help everyone lead that rich creative life that provides value for themselves and provides value for the planet, provides value to the future. And if that's the mission we on service of then these very same technologies, if we can get really smart, we can start to utilize them. Here's here as part of design swarms, it's a little bit in the future, but a pet project that I am beginning to work on is the whole idea of blockchain has the possibility of really being this marvelous technology because today it turns out we don't have a way to really, if somebody comes up with a really smart idea and unless that person happens to sit with a large corporation where they can pay all the money to apply for patents and so on, you get the reward for their efforts to that creativity.
- But if we start to think about these kind of ledgers, which able to be to clarify who owns certain intellectual property, the right way of framing this technology could be that everyone I think of the farmer in the rice field in Indonesia who comes up with a great idea can then be the owner of that idea and that would be the right framing of this technology to use these technologies in the service of creating service of humans, rather the service only of very large tech businesses.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Well it brings me to a question about incentives. So do we have an industry that is incentivized to prioritize at least to some degree, maybe not equally serving humanity? And again, this is a bit of a loose concept, not very well defined, but the greater good over and above profit. So are we currently getting the outcomes that we deserve based on the constraints and ways in which we've currently designed our system of commerce?
- Surya Vanka:
- I'm finding that I'm personally through authentic spending more and more time with clients who are in the wellness business, in the wellbeing business. I mean today what we call healthcare is evolving into wellbeing and this is, it's driven by a profit motive, but it's also driven by a upswell in this concern across the planet. And maybe one of the things we will end up saying thank you pandemic is because it brought us back to recognizing that's the most important thing, right? Wellbeing. So it's been a catalyst to move the forward. So if I think that is, I don't think it's happening yet, but I think the opportunity exists in that space, in the wellness or wellbeing industry for that kind of right alignment to take place.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's turn the lens now back to design as a profession and hopefully this will make sense in a second. So I was watching recently a video by Kareem Rashid who I believe is a famous designer and in terms of interior and product and he was complaining about the democratization of design and the impact that that is having on his ability to maintain a price premium in the marketplace. And I couldn't help but listen to this video and imagine that was what the Catholic church was complaining about when the great unwashed Protestants started printing and reading Bibles on their own. It just sort of seemed to me to come from a place of in incredible privilege and it was quite myopic in its view as to the increase or influx of designers into the marketplace over the last 20 to 30 years. So my question for you is from your perspective is design thinking and other associated ways of democratizing design, is it helping design or is it harming design as a profession?
- Surya Vanka:
- My view, there's a couple of things going on here. On the one hand I think it's a very, very positive thing if we end up with a planet with 8 billion designers, I see nothing wrong with that. If we can say that everybody gets a chance to be a designer, that'd be a wonderful thing. Why not? Now another thread through this is of course design is hot designs sizzling hot right now and there is a lot of careers to be made by putting the word design on your business card
- Without really having studied or practiced design. But I think there's room for that as well. There is a room for that in the sense this is of course the interesting thing, interesting distinction between in design thinking and design doing, there's plenty of room for a lot of doers as long as you don't mix up these two things. Design working is a very sophisticated, highly skilled highly skilled way of thinking. It takes thousands of hours to master this. There is the matter of getting the skills at tools which does not require as much of the sophistication that goes into doing. Now these two have got all jumbled up and because design has emerged so quickly as becoming in many cases the differentiator because there's so many folks gravitating to it and because there's so many schools and workshops that claim to turn you into particularly a UX designer in two weeks or three, yes, three months.
- And so there we see this problem of the commodification of really a very, very sophisticated science. There is a problem and I think there are different ways. One could look at that from a parochial lens. One could say this was my thing, you are encroaching on my territory and you're doing this. And of course a lot of that conversation that happens with it's like get your logo done for $5 on fiber and it dilutes what it takes to create a brand and all of that. So there is that challenge. But of course all of that's happening because we are in the thick of this moment where design has just very suddenly arrived to the center. I don't know if the model that Sabine Ying professor, Sabine Jinga, who I think when she was that the University of Lancaster, I think she created this beautiful model of the four stages of design maturity and she described them as sort of four bubbles and the first bubble she's got, there are organizations and then there is something sitting outside called design a little dot.
- And that stage one design as a satellite, actually stage two is there is the organization. And that little dot has moved here into this design as a peer to many other functions that are taking place. And then the stage three and that dots in the center now design as core to the organization and stage four where this entire shape is designed. So the four stages, now what's happened is there's a bunch of places in the world that have seen successes of Apple and Airbnb and Nike and a bunch of places and they want that designy thing, but they don't understand what it is. And so there is this, we are in this time where there's a lot of folks who lay claim, but I am the expert in that without actually having capabilities to do that. So I see that as part of what's taking place in this time, it'll settle out, but we are in the thick of it right now. I don't know if that answered your question at all.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it leads to another question. So I've recently been thinking about the role of qualifications and standards. Now I think it's pretty clear that you can go to university, you can earn an undergraduate degree, you can do postgraduate degrees, you can do a PhD in design. So those are clearly signifies and they communicate a level of depth and understanding of a field and they're no doubt important. But you mentioned the rise of the boot camps and UX courses that promise the world within three to six months and the inability of the marketplace to seemingly determine between quality design candidates and people that may not be as high quality, that is still on their journey somewhere on that mountain. What is the role role particularly for product design? So digital in particular, it seems like architecture and other related schools have quite well established and longer track records in terms of how they credential their designers. But what role, if any, do we need at the moment in digital product for some clarity and alignment on what it looks like and what it means to be a great designer?
- Surya Vanka:
- So I think there are two places where this question is being teased out. I think it turns out that I've had a lens into both of these at this particular moment and I've been involved. One is of course the whole accreditation process of what are programs that can offer these things called degrees, the things that give you the stamp that says you are a designer. Yes, we don't have licenses in design. I don't have a strong opinion on that but there's accreditation bodies that say, okay, there's a bunch of mostly for-profit schools that tend to be much more vocational around design and they tend to be like I call the design doing and then they're the other university and design school education. That's a broader education that's around design thinking and doing and both. So it's being teased out I think in the accreditation place.
- So I get to be part of a bunch of these bodies just looking, okay, is this design training or design education? So there's a place for training and there's somebody's got to make the icons, somebody has to make the layouts. They may not have the skills to actually go understand real needs and the scenario and experience outcomes and do all that. But so in that case, there's a certain place of training. The other place will get teased out outside of academia and accreditation is in what I work with a bunch of companies on figuring out what is their own laddering system of designers within organizations, what are career journeys of designers. So it's okay to actually come in at a junior level from one of these boot campy places where you have certain skills of the Adobe suite using Figma and so on. And there's clarity that those are certain skills that are a certain level of the ladder.
- And from there, just because education itself has changed, we learn from YouTube and we learn from Khan Academy and we learn from Instagram and we learn from our learning. Learning has changed. We don't have to learn exactly the same ways we learn in the 20th centuries. Our learning can be very different, but still if there's clarity that you can start at a certain place in the career and then as you grow in sophistication and your understanding your practice and you get your 10,000 hours of practicing and interviewing and whatever those things that you're doing, the track that you're on, you grow within that. So I guess my thinking is we may not, I don't know if it serves us only to think about this using the structures that we know from other disciplines that actually did that in the 19th and 20th century to architecture to make and they need to have licenses to make sure that buildings go, don't go tumbling down. That's where it came from. There's a case we made that we need licenses so that Cambridge Analytica doesn't happen [laugh], right? But there may be other structures within organizations that are needed, but think these are the two places that I'm involved in in terms of just clarifying.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So for those practitioners like Kareem that are feeling the hoards of hungry graduates and people that have entered the field in recent years breathing down their necks so to speak, what is the opportunity that actually they're failing currently to see that lies ahead of them, to take or improve or do something different with their career and to shed that anxiety that they might be failing. Now
- Surya Vanka:
- I can really reflect on my own career and what I do. So if I reflect to my own career, there was a time when I was in design school, I was learning at this furious pace and I learned about design thread, then I practiced and then I went through a certain learning point. Now after having been a designer for almost three decades, I am back to that same feverish pace of learning. I think what also changed was the contract with learning. Our old contract with learning was you go to these places called Design Schools university, what are the discipline? And then you go invest in yourself and then you do a whole bunch of learning and then you go out and spend the rest of your life using that learning in your career. I think that has shifted. Now we are in the business. I mean, I'm not saying anything new here, but lifelong learning, but it's real now.
- I find myself a certain level of my own knowledge gets obsolete every 18 to 36 months. My core understanding of design remains pretty resilient. If you think about a river, the deeper current of the river continues to be rock solid. But there's new things that are coming, whether it is happening in the world of technology, whether it's happening in the world, in society, whether it's happening in ethics, whether it's happening inclusion, whether it's happening in the way we view gender, the way we do all that. I have to keep learning and refreshing and think about what does that mean to my practice as a designer? And my practice changes constantly. And my practice, if I look at was when I was learning as a student, was changing dramatically. And then for a long time it didn't change that dramatically, but it's back to really changing dramatically.
- And for me, again, reflecting again to or a question, what should a seasoned sort of design star be doing at this point? And my own answer to that, I have new coaches, a bunch of them who are in their twenties. And so I'm investing into learning in much bigger ways knowing that whatever I have learned and whatever has made me successful in the past is not going to serve me going forward. And it's actually a lot of fun, right? Because it's good. It's a really interesting time to learn as well. And the platforms for learning are so accessible, so learning and the reference that I would share of course is Carol Dweck's book on growth hacking the growth mindset. I think that that's really been a pretty powerful book for me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's an excellent book actually. If you haven't picked it up, people definitely go and pick it up and have a read. I couldn't help but think that it was such a humbling thing to do for you to are a very successful designer. I mean, I don't need to go back through your introduction and the other things that you've done again, but to actually take on a coach or coaches that are in their twenties is not a typical way that people think about how that relationship between younger and older should be framed, particularly when it comes to someone who's accomplished things in design. And I just think that that's such refreshing take on a two-way transfer of value. And I hadn't really heard of anyone else doing that. I'm not suggesting people aren't doing that, but yeah, wow. What a great thing to do. And I'm sure they're learning things from you as well.
- Surya Vanka:
- I can share my specific practice. I have an Excel spreadsheet, which is called my 100 teachers. And every year I update that and the learning and there's more and more young people doing extraordinary things that I wouldn't have done and that I'm so curious about. And what I try to do is maybe have two or three conversations in a year with them. I find it extraordinary. I think one of the beauties and the benefits of having a reasonably long, somewhat successful career is you feel the F ground fairly firm beneath your feet. Anything new that's coming, it's only going to serve me. So this is a practice that I started about five or six years ago, has really served me well just to have a, and it's just two or three 30 minute conversation. I learned so much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's so important. That's a really good message. I feel it's definitely something you've made me think about how I might be able to do something similar in my practice. You talked about inclusivity briefly. You just briefly mentioned that word not that long ago in our conversation. And I want to come to that because I believe while you're at Microsoft, that was inclusive design was something that you were a huge proponent of. And I'll quote you now. You've said when we design for extreme cases, we actually end up serving everybody. There's no such thing as a normal human. So it sounds like what you are saying is that we shouldn't be designing our products and services for most people. We should be designing them for all people.
- Surya Vanka:
- Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, I have to one this is not by any means an original thought. There's universal designs been preaching this forever. What has happened is universal, the ethos of universal design has found itself into the digital world as inclusive design and has extended that, extended that, right? But why I think this particular why inclusion, obviously if one is committed to a democratic ideal that everybody should have the benefits equitably of what we create as designers. We have to think about inclusion. Now the interesting thing of course is in our times we have gone from products that when I've designed products as an industrial design, in the past sometimes I designed products that maybe a hundred thousand users would use because designs are making of multiples of the same thing. There are a hundred thousand toasters that were made, a hundred thousand people. But as I've worked in companies like Microsoft, the decisions that I'm making are being used by a billion or 2 billion people.
- So now of course the challenge of how you design the one thing that actually serves so many people who by definition are very diverse. So inclusion comes to the forefront really. Now how do we make sure that this thing we create actually fits everybody? And the way to do that really, I believe is that we are, if we can understand in what we are creating, we can answer the question of who gets excluded. Do you get excluded because you are older? Do you get excluded because you have a physical impairment of some kind? Do you get excluded because you are rural? Do you get excluded because you don't know a certain language? The moment we create something, we exclude people. But if we start with that question about who is getting excluded and then we get really smart in terms of thinking about how we think about who are all getting excluded, and we design so that those folks don't get excluded, you end up creating products that even when you design it for a billion people, everybody gets included. There's a one new answer to this digital products, given that these are services very often and it's not exactly the same product area on, but that question really starting with understanding who gets excluded really changes how we design.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's an uncomfortable question I imagine for quite a few people to think about for at least my own experience. A lot of the organizations and that people are getting better at now, organizations are more mindful of this now, but it wasn't really something or a question that was ever asked before, not, and accessibility and inclusive design was almost like a line item and a budget somewhere, if at all. There was a feature. That's
- Surya Vanka:
- Right. In fact you're absolutely right. Absolutely. And in fact, the bulk of the work really that we do with authentic is really around inclusion these days. And there is something that I've created called the inclusive design process map. That's a systematic way to actually start thinking about these questions. There's a construct called the iceberg of exclusion to allow very systematic way to understand what are all the ways that people get excluded. And my experience of it when I teach this, we go work with small startups and large organizations and we run through projects using the inclusive design process map, which also use the design S form approach is actually quite the opposite of feeling constrained. People feel liberated when people get that buzz where they feel that they are doing something worthwhile. And it's again, one of those things we've talked about these places where dualities come together. It's some of those places where when you design something that's inclusive, two things happen. One is of course you're doing things that everybody gets the benefit of. Yes. The other thing is because we are all, as businesses struggling with how to serve diverse markets, now you get the key to be able to actually go have a thriving business in a diverse market. So both of those come together. So I find that this is very, very galvanizing for organizations
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And for any lawyers that might be listening any in in-house council, you're probably going to be less likely to get sued as well. So it works as absolutely as risk mitigation.
- Surya Vanka:
- Exactly. Yeah. I'll get you the markets. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hundred percent. Oh, I want to take this thread of inclusivity and design and talk about a design swarm project that you are involved with. I believe that you led actually, which is one in Seattle. And it was a project that aimed to help the city's homeless. In this case, the woman that were homeless in Seattle escape domestic violence. Yeah. Now you said, and I'll quote you again here when you're referring to homeless women may not have known the design thinking process, but they knew their lives very well. Now, why I wanna talk to you about this is that design thinking of which design swarms is a methodology on top of, or it's a complimentary way of using design thinking is sometimes used as a way, and I'm not saying design swarms are here, I just wanna be very clear about that. But design thinking is sometimes used as an expedient way of generating solutions without actually including the people for whom those solutions are for, which is a criticism of design thinking, right? What role, what role and how critical or not critical at all is it to actually involve the people you're seeking to serve in design thinking through a methodology like design swarms?
- Surya Vanka:
- Yeah. So in the particular project we are looking at, Seattle had the very shameful distinction some years ago of having over 500 homeless women on the streets, enough that the mayor had declared it a citywide emergency. And there is a spectacular organization and a shelter called Mary's Place in Seattle who had been doing really very, very good work to take on this crisis. And so this partnership was with the folks at Mary's place and it was bringing some designers, some business folks, some technologists working with the folks who had experienced homelessness, who at Mary's Place. Now I think one of the challenges of smart people and smart designers, we can often think, I could probably imagine what the life of a homeless person is. Tell me a little bit about that. I can probably stretch and understand that. So one of the things that becomes very clear when you're working in a co-creation framework is you realize that you actually can't understand at that depth.
- So there's a lot of power and co in co-creation, especially when you are in a resource poor situation and very quickly need to be able to understand and start to solve things. So there is a notion of co-creation. In this particular case, there were a number of epiphanies. One of them which was the most powerful one, was very quickly in the project. It became clear that the challenge of homelessness among women was not simply about not having a roof, a woman not having a roof over her head when she became homeless. The challenge was had a different level of nuances, which was how a woman becomes homeless. Oftentimes that's preceded by a lot of awful things happening in a household. There's violence, there is all kinds of bad things happening, and which sometimes precipitates with a woman having to flee, and sometimes that happens in the middle of the night. And when she does that, oftentimes it is when all of her identity documents are withheld from her and she just flips. So she's out on the streets, but she has no way to identify herself and just given the nature of shelter. So that is one of the prerequisites that you need to be able to get into a shelter.
- And so that was understanding the brittleness of the system that came from lived experiences and the solution once one is got that insight, then coming up with solutions throughout simple, it ended up being a cloud-based service and a way that a woman at risk could proactively upload documentation to the cloud and access it as needed and so on. So that became the trajectory of the solution. But that particular key came from lived experience and that's where that co-creation became really powerful. And so whether it working its refugee communities, working with folks suffering from opioid addiction or in less dramatic severe cases, working with the impact on Seattle downtown from Covid and [inaudible], this notion of actually bringing people whose lives are directly impacted and who have lived experiences but who may not be designers, who are not designers, and moving through a designer process being coached and helped with folks who more familiar design has proved to be a successful approach.
- So here I'm really talking about the notion of co-creation and using this particular framework of design swarms for co-creation. There's probably worth saying a little bit about design swarms and how that fits into it. The notion of design swarms is for me, I have the opportunity at Microsoft and other places to, while I've been teaching design and helping organizations take a designerly approach to doing things, there's another thread that's also been going through where I've been noticing organizations that are performant versus organizations that are less performant. And one of the patterns that I've noticed is that when they're complex problems, the kind of organizations that seem to create successful results that stick and be able to do that quickly are less often the top-down command and control kind of organizations. But it's when teams get the opportunity to be more nimble, to behave like ant farms, to have autonomy, to be self organizing.
- I like to liken this. When they're able to move in concert like AHO of Fish, they get seem to get things done fast. And organizations that have adopted this notion of swarming on problems and have managed to instrument that in one way or the other, it's been instrumented in some ways in software programming, this notion, some of these ideas. So what design swarms are really is bringing together design thinking and this notion of multiple teams concurrently working on a problem on the same problem. And those teams made up of folks who are come from different disciplines and requiring none of them to know design, but using very prescriptive process maps where each team has a set of these process maps and they work through process. But as they're going through that by choreographing what I call the swarm dynamics, where the teams, they are quickly learning design situationally just what they need to do the next step, but then also looking sideways to see what other teams have done and learning from each other and learning from the live knowledge that lives within the room.
- Well in sometimes the physical room, but these days it's happening on our digital whiteboards and being run across continent. That is in the core, the idea of design swarms, that there is a way that the design thinking process is made visible and simplified and teams are able to go through that journey. The journey of traversing what I call problem space and after travel traversing problem space, traversing solution space, and do that as a team, but also watch other teams do that and learn from each other. And in this way, swarm on a problem together. So that's the idea of the design swarm. It's sort of like it's akin to a sprint, but it's a little bit different from a sprint given that are multiple teams working concurrently and that they all work in the same problem and they tend to move through the entire process and tends to be 20, 30 up to about 300 people at the same time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I haven't been through a design swarm myself, but I do having been through a lot of design thinking exercises and sprints and other things have the sense that design thinking doesn't, or the experience that design thinking doesn't particularly leave a lot of time for thinking outside of the group context. And why I wanted to raise this with you is I was interested on your perspectives about sometimes the pressure cooked environment that design exercises can construct around them and the conditions that they place, the people who are within the exercise in some of which may not be incredibly extroverted and or not light enough to think on their feet to the degree and the intensity that the processes may require. So how does design swarms, or how should we be thinking about making space for people that may just think differently or people that are neurodiverse and may not feel the drive to participate in these activities in the same way as potentially most people do?
- Surya Vanka:
- For me I can't claim to have the final answer there, but I can tell you what I have been experimenting with for some years and I found quite successful. One is of course a setup. I formed the teams for design swamps very carefully and intentionally understand participants and really sort of try to keep the thrill and the joy of that journey alive through that and also through the orchestration, because very much orchestration, it needs to be orchestrated that you're very aware of what rises up emotionally for people in these exercises. I mean, one of the very natural things that happens and which one has to design for is this, I talked earlier about creative courage. When we go into design, that's one of the things we are learning. We get skilled and we learn this thing called creative courage and that we get quite comfortable spending huge amounts of time without a clue, [laugh], that there's anything going to come out of the other hand. But because we've done it enough times, we know a feeling in the stomach that it's okay to sit with this uncertainty for a while. Because eventually it turns out as long as you follow the process, something will come.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But we don't tell our business stakeholders that, do we? No,
- Surya Vanka:
- It's not. It's a very, very alien feeling for folks [laugh], right? It's a very alien. So a lot of emotions come up. So in design, swarms, I'll often use techniques from meditation, use music and various things. But one has to be aware of what's happening emotionally in a room and the different also the social dynamics that are taking place. So again like I said, I don't have the final answer, but I think it's a very juicy place to recognize these are not just cogs in a machine that come in. These are human beings and human beings who come in with that great creative capacity, but they're human beings. And the orchestration of these times, when we create these bursts of creativity to come up with these incredible results, you have to very carefully create very, very safe places. Very, very joyful places for this to happen, right? Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There can be a tendency for us to apply process, some sort of rote exercise. And I really love exactly what you're saying about how mindful you are about the design of the swarm itself and managing the fluffier side of what it means to be a human, and absolutely. How that differs for people as they go through the swarm. Exactly.
- Surya Vanka:
- And hopefully I teach facilitation, and one of the things that I've always teach, if you are not intensely curious and wanting to learn through a process, that's what paying attention to. It's just like that spreadsheet you going into, any of these things, you have to be super curious. You've gotta be learning as well because you've got so many minds who can teach you, even if you orchestrate and create the space for it, hold the time and space for, there is a lot of things that people can teach you. And going into that attitude makes a big difference. For me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Surya spoken in the past about how the people who work in product design technology in such a privileged position to shape the lives of so many other people, specifically you've said, what do we do with this awesome power? Because there's 7 billion people on the planet. Each of them is unique, but there's only a very tiny percentage of people making the decisions for everybody. And we are starting to see some of the problems with that. So for my final question, for our wonderful conversation today, what are the problems you're referring to and what do you want each person listening to this to think about or to do about them?
- Surya Vanka:
- Everyone at every moment in history, of course, thinks they stand in extraordinary times, [laugh], right? But we are at an extraordinary moment in history right now. I mean, when I think the pandemic is that first shared human experience that all humans on planet earth have had at the same time, it's the first synchronous experience ever met. So even in that, we've got this kind of planetary awareness that is so we are in this particular moment, we are also in this particular moment that we have no idea if we're falling deeper into the hole or we don't know if we are at the beginning, the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end. We don't know. So we have this moment of super uncertainty. Still, this moment that humanity is going through can be seen as a portal or a whole, if you think you're, you make the decision whether you're going to fall deep into the hole or you think about it as a portal that we pass through to come to something else.
- And I am of the portal side. I believe this is a portal we are going somewhere. This is really kind of, or the opportunity to go somewhere is really interesting. So now with that framing of this particular particularly important moment that we are in when we are having this conversation, you asked me the question, I really like the framing of design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, right. Design 1.0 being the design of messages and products, design 2.0. Being that of experiences 3.0 is organizational change in organizations and 4.0 being really designed at a planetary scale with human or actually life at the center, not just human center design, designed life center, design of the center. And this particular moment, I think we are also making that transition from design three point to design 4.2, whether it's kicking and screaming because we can't help it or whether we want to go there, we are making that transition.
- What's happening this moment? So when I think about, again, this notion, the responsibility of design, the opportunity of design and responsibility of design, it just turns out that this particular transition that we are making from Design 3.0 to 4.0, this is scary. Big complex vuca. Mm-hmm. Volatile, uncertain, full of change and ambiguity. And there's not many other disciplines who can take a leadership role in doing this, except our own discipline that is by, in its very DNA is future oriented and loves VUCA situations and thrives when there's volatility, uncertainty, change and ambiguity. That's what it does best. Everything was frameworks. Even using visuality in this service of problem solving, the whole idea of visioning the future, because every time we do the sign, it is this ridiculously insane, brave act. Something doesn't exist and we are at place and we claim with this abuc logic, it will exist.
- And the only reason that we knowing that exists is because we've gone through these processes before and this new thing existed. So we are convicted that this new will exist. And so it gives us the energy to move forward. There are not many disciplines that look forward into the future that way. Most look backwards and increment from the past. So at this moment, when the planet moves from this 3.08 to 4.0 time and design, as our discipline moves in, I think that is the calling, that's the opportunity, that's the leadership opportunity for this discipline, for this minority discipline. That's the leadership opportunity. And there's a lot of stepping up into this leadership opportunity too, because there's also these other kind of dark patterns of reluctant leadership that we have in the design profession. But that's another whole conversation thing. So did that answer your question?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sure did. And what a great challenge and opportunity to contemplate and end the show on today, Surya. It's been such a enjoyable and expansive conversation. It's certainly given me cause to think of a few new things. I feel much sharper having had it, and I really appreciate the scope of thinking that you've brought to this conversation and the energy. So thank you for so generously sharing your stories and your insights with me today.
- Surya Vanka:
- Thank you Brendan. Boy, you asked good questions that so much fun.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome, Surya. I'm glad you had a good time. And if people wanna find out more about you, what you are doing with authentic design, more about design swarms, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Surya Vanka:
- I would say the place to begin really LinkedIn is really becoming a repository where everything is living. So that's a good starting place just because there is the world of Authentic, there's the world of Design Swarms and there's other writing so on. So LinkedIn, Surya Vanka on LinkedIn would be the best place.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Surya. I'll make sure that we link to your LinkedIn profile and also to anything else that I've referenced in my preparation today. There are some great talks that Surya has given so it will be available in the show notes for everybody. And to everybody, thanks for tuning in. It's been great having you here and to listen into this wonderful conversation about design and the opportunity that lies ahead for us as designers and as a race, as the human race. Everything, as I mentioned, will be covered in the show notes, including my profile. You'll be able to find that there at the very bottom. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe to the podcast, and also pass the show along. Send someone a link if you feel that they would get value from these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, like I said, you can find my profile at the bottom of the show notes on YouTube and on all the podcast platforms. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And remember, keep being brave.