Shelley Evenson
Designing Corporate Innovation
In this episode of Brave UX, Shelley Evenson unpacks the challenges of designing for corporate innovation 🕯️, the dark-side of design thinking 🎭, and how AI may help and hinder us 🤖.
Highlights include:
- Why shouldn’t big corporates try to emulate startups?
- How is that we’re not designing experiences for people?
- What reservations do you have about corporate design thinking?
- How do we know if AI is providing us with accurate information?
- What role does timing play in the success or failure of innovation?
Who is Shelley Evenson?
Shelley is a Managing Director of Accenture Song, a global customer experience consulting group that brings together data science, design, technology and marketing to deliver transformative insights and scalable technical solutions 🟣.
Prior to Accenture Song, Shelley was the Group Director of Organisational Evolution at Fjord and she also worked as an Experience Researcher and Research Manager at Facebook 🔍, and as a Principal User Experience Design Manager at Microsoft.
Before Big Tech, Shelley was as an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design, where she lectured in interaction design and built a closer relationship between industry and the schools of design, business, and HCI 🔗.
Shelley is a co-founder and former advisory board member of the Service Design Network, a global community of service design professionals.
She has served as the co-editor of Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design 📚, and is a contributor to several books and papers on service design, interaction design and design strategy.
In 2010 Shelley was recognised by ACAD as a Woman Innovator in Design 🚀.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, a behavior-based UX research practice for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds. And also the home of New Zealand's only human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Shelley Evenson. Shelley is a managing director of Accenture Song, a global customer experience consulting group that brings together data science, design, technology, and marketing to deliver transformative insights and scalable technical solutions.
- Prior to her role at Accenture's Song, Shelley was the group director of organizational evolution at Fjord, the global service design consultancy that Accenture acquired in 2013.
- Shelley's career has also seen her invest time in big tech, including at Facebook as an experienced researcher and research manager, and at Microsoft as a principal user experience design manager.
- She has also been an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design, where she lectured an interaction design and built a closer relationship between industry and the schools of design business and HCI.
- Before joining Carnegie Mellon, Shelley had built an impressive 25 year career as a designer and manager at renowned design consultancies, among them, Landor and Fitch and Publicis Sapient.
- Shelley is also a co-founder and former advisory board member of the Service Design Network, a global community of service design professionals. She has served as the co-editor of Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design, and as a contributor to several books and papers on service design, interaction design and design strategy
- A generous contributor to the field, Shelley has also served on the National Research Council's Committee on Human Systems integration, and has been on the advisory board for both the American Center for Design and AIGA.
- In 2010 she was recognized by ACAD as a woman innovator in design. And now it's my great pleasure to have Shelley here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Shelley, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Hi, and thank you so much for having me, Brendan. It's, it's a pleasure to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a pleasure to have you here, Shelley, and I hope you will forgive me for starting on what is a rather obtuse area to dig into. And that is that I noticed something about you when we were, for today when I was doing my research, looking at our emails, going back over your LinkedIn profile, and that was that you are not a huge fan of the capitalization rules. And by that I'm, I'm talking about written English for people, not finance here. So just by way of example for people, what I mean by this is that the first letter of your first and last name in your email signature is lowercase. Now, I was curious about this. What does this all mean?
- Shelley Evenson:
- What does it mean? I just like lowercase, what could I say? I think it's one of those things where when I studied typography when I was in school, I always felt that caps are interrupters and they begin things. But I wanted my name to be a whole thing without interruption. So they had it. I like lowercase.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There is, there's one exception in your experience section of your LinkedIn profile, all your other job titles and jobs, lowercase only. And I noticed that your position at your managing director position at Accenture Song was using se sentence case. And I thought, oh, maybe someone said something to you in that regard.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, there is a preference for set case at Accenture. I will, sorry. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey, let's have a chat about the arc of your career. I'll stop giving you a hard time about lowercase. I actually, I hear where you're coming from though. I think there's something easier about the readability of lowercase only. But anyway, I digress. Coming back to the arc of your career, you started working out for many years at notable design consultancies, as I mentioned just recently in your intro. And then you went to work at Carnegie Mellon. So you went out of consultancy into higher education, and then you did your stint at Big Tech and then back to consulting where you went to work at Fjord, which then I believe became Accenture song. So you seemed to have come full circle here. What was it that brought you back to design consulting?
- Shelley Evenson:
- So I really did consciously design my career to think about the fact that I loved consulting and I had loved working with clients and I always felt that I couldn't quite understand what it was like in their shoes and their roles inside. So I thought it would be really fun to have an opportunity to do that. Academia was a whole nother thing. I love learning, I love teaching. It was such a joy and such a fabulous experience to be a Carnegie Mellon and have the incredible students that I had. But I love consulting. I think that what's really special about designers is that we look at the holes and the parts and I think many organizations have a hard time going back and forth, and that's why I like to help them with that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What surprised you the most after going client side? And I think that was at Microsoft?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, the first one was Microsoft. I asked them to support me to leave, cause I had just gotten tenure at Carnegie Mellon and they said, sure, but we want you to just leave and actually join us. And it was a really interesting group. It was initially what we were looking at was how do we essentially design startups within Microsoft? We brought together the business strategy and the technology. They were just really trying to understand how to bring the design piece to that. And so it was really intriguing, the sad but true category.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about that.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Ray Yazi decided that he didn't want to pursue that anymore, and we became a group called The Future of Social Experience. But I can't say that that was a bad experience either. I learned a lot about social before social was really popular and many really interesting opportunities to sort of look at a broader landscape of what things could do. So yeah, that's what intrigued me. And then one of my former students recruited me away from Microsoft to Facebook, and that stint was social experience there. It led to the stint in social experience with Facebook.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's come to what you touched on briefly there, which is around Microsoft trying to establish, it sounded like the conditions for startups to thrive there within the larger corporate. Now, I heard you reflect in one of your talks that I think you gave at the end of 2018 about how you were feeling around the early 2010s, about the concerns that you had with the way in which some organizations were trying to realize the potential of design. And one of those concerns you had was with the growth of innovation labs inside larger corporates. So I felt like this was quite relevant given what you just said. And about this, you said, and I'll quote you now, the thing that I was concerned about at the time is that they were not necessarily responding in the right ways. The first way they were responding is saying, we should act like a startup. So why shouldn't big corporates try and emulate startups?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, the, I'm remembering that talk now. I think the thing that's really important about that is they're not trying to pretend to be something that they're not. And you can take on some of the attitudes, but the cultures in large corporations just aren't there to support and nourish the kind of behavior you have in a startup. And I think that's why it doesn't work. And I think that I obviously learned some things from my experience at Microsoft and thinking about what those things could be. It's like there's antibodies in the environment and it's just naturally wants to kill the intruder.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is there anything that might resemble what we have here in New Zealand, probably more pronounced than in America, but this syndrome called tall poppy syndrome where the whole seeks to level off the tallest poppy so that it doesn't get more than its fair share of sun. Did you ever observe or were you ever aware of any of that type of behavior where the innovation lab people were perceived as being special and different and therefore they were a target for the people that were in the original corporate design?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I think that that's always the danger actually, right? That everyone, you can't help but see the grass is always greener and you say, well, how is it that they get to do that? We don't have the opportunity to do that. How is it that they're so special? And even within a small design firm, I will tell you that we were a lab within a small design firm and people started having that sort of natural reaction. It's not fair. So we decided to take on the worst projects, specifically projects that no one wanted to do. One of them was doing packaging and merchandising for toilet seat covers, right? But they couldn't say it anymore once we started to do that, and we had fun with that and we found a way to sort of break through there, it stopped the conversation. It didn't stop them from feeling it, but it stopped the conversation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So literally taking on the shitty jobs helped to Exactly. Quiet the quiet voices.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Exactly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What does this mean though, for companies of whatever size, you mentioned being even in a smaller design consultancy, that the othering that can happen when you carve off a particular group and give them a particular mandate like that to innovate can lead to these antibodies. The rejection of that, the want to normalize it back and for no one to be seen as special. What does that mean for the way in which we should be thinking about enabling innovation and change within organizations through design?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I guess my view on that is that if we are really careful about shaping the culture, then that's a really good step. And I also think that one of the things that I've been see, I've seen be successful is to rotate people through. And so you have sort of a core, but then you have the same opportunity and then you can sort of refresh the core. And I think that's really nice about that because the people who you know don't want to get stuck in your mindset around how you do innovation either. So having fresh eyes all the time is always really helpful. So I think that's the most successful thing, but it really stems from building the right kind of culture. And it's one of the things where we, in agencies, they have this term creatives, and I've always had a problem with that as a name for a group of people because it by nature implies that others are not right. That these are the chosen people who are creative and then other people who are not. So I've always shied away from that kind of nomenclature, and I think establishing rituals and really consciously crafting how you do what you do and inviting these other people in is key to being successful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It also sounds to me like that way of doing that by opening up and rotating positions within the innovation practice, for lack of a bit of word, it gives people something to aspire to. And so it changes it from being, it's a sort of walled kingdom into, you might get picked to be part of that. So it may change the psychology of how people think about and respond to the innovation practice,
- Shelley Evenson:
- Like a working vacation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I like it. I like it.
- I wanted to ask you about going a little deeper into this, about something that you'd observed, I think secondhand in this case, which was the way in which Jeff Bezos was talking about what makes Amazon innovative. And you said about this, and I'll quote you again, they couldn't do it if that was constrained, if it was an innovation group, it would never work. The innovation has to be distributed and it has to be distributed among people who have different kinds of skills. So this notion in a mega corporation like Amazon of having innovation happen in a distributed way rather than in a centralized way, what is it from your perspective that without the focus of an innovation group, what is it that actually enables this innovation to come into the world to actually to be generated if it isn't concentrated? What is it what that Amazon and maybe other companies like them that you've observed or consulted with, what are they doing to enable that at scale across their organizations?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Well, I would say in the case of Amazon, and it clearly came from leadership, that was the expectation. And I think that you could see some of the early explorations that they did. And I think scale always brings challenges to that kind of distribution. A lot of it comes from actually scaling people up in the methods and approaches that you can use obtaining and this innovator's mindset, or I like to think of it as a more childish mindset in many ways where you don't, you're always poking and trying. So I think that's really what's key there. I think it's really hard to maintain though that practice of innovation at scale. You can see it. It's like with Amazon, they're pulling back. Microsoft has sort of come forward in things, but Google is pulling back even from what I read a couple of weeks ago, right, their moonshots, because it's really hard. It's really hard to get things that actually meet people's unmet needs are timed appropriately because a lot of it has to do with timing. A lot of my career I think would've been different if the timing had been different.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We often underweight the influence and impact of timing, and I wonder whether that's got to do with the fact that it's not possible to run two career arcs in parallel and know all the decisions and things that would've happened if things were different. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. I think we definitely underappreciate the role that timing plays in innovation and also our own personal success.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I mean, I think of things that we conceived of 20, 25 years ago working with Xerox and Kodak and these other companies, and they were the right ideas to address the needs. It's just that it was, as a friend of mine that I worked with, collaborated with from Xerox, used to say it's a small matter of programming. And I think what we've seen in the last, what three, four months has suggested that this we're in a new arc and that programming and the fact that that compute power has made all of these things possible, so many of those things that we're conceived of then will come about in new forms. Now it's just things speciate
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A hundred percent. I want to come to your paper that you wrote or your article that you wrote on AI at some point in the conversation. But before we do that, I want to touch on something that you said just a little earlier around helping in these organizations at scale to skill up people. And I forget now the term that I think you were talking about the innovators mindset or something of that nature. I I remember also listening to something that you were saying about your concerns about how organizations were embracing design at least around about a decade ago. And it was to do with when design thinking really became part of the corporate nomenclature, and it was the thing that was the big hot thing. And it has been for a while now, maybe at Star is it started to fade now, but you described it as observing companies trying to do this as putting new windows in your house and expecting to see differently. So it sounds like from your assessment there that you felt that many companies didn't really want to see the work that was required in order to make design thinking work.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I think that that's absolutely true. And going through the motions and saying, well, now that this practice, you can just apply it. Well, I don't believe that. I really think, and I wrote another piece with one of my colleagues and one of the founders of Fjord, Ola Schibs, and we wrote a piece that was the design rule of three, which is you need design thinking, you need design doing, and you need a design culture. And I think if there's anything I've learned is that culture, as I brought up early on in the conversation, is critical. I think it's not just learning the methods you have to do the work. A lot of that has to do with being willing to go out and look at the people, be with the people, understand the people that you're designing for, that you want to support. And whether that's in the B2B situation or b2c or it's a service that you're trying to conceive of, you have to really fundamentally understand the people first and go from there. And many organizations say, it's too expensive to do that research. It takes too much time to do that research. And my response has always been the same, which is, do you want to spend a little time now or a lot of time later when you don't have it? So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What is design if we are not doing that, if we don't have proximity to users, what are we doing? Are we doing design?
- Shelley Evenson:
- I think that's a really good question. You're kind of producing for yourself, which to me is more what artists do only they do only. They do it really well. Most corporations when they're producing for themselves are not doing it very well. And you see that, I think we have changed in the last few years with the pandemic and the sort of crisis we have, the trends that we put out, the life trends, but they're the fjord trends, and we talk about this, we're in this kind of permanent crisis situation now, and it feels like, is it ever going to get better? But I think there are these small pockets of positive responses and pulling out the good things in the day to day, which is equally important. But yeah, I think people aren't willing to tolerate organizations that don't support both value and values
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And speaking about value and values in the context of design thinking. There are some designers in this very broad mosaic of a design community that we have that feel that design thinking has devalued the practice of design. And there may be various reasons for that. One of the concerns people have is they feel like it gives people the expectation that anyone can be a great non-visual designer in just a few days. How do you feel about design thinking and its contribution to design and whether or not there's any merit in those concerns that some corners of the design community have expressed about it?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I do worry about it. And to me, again, it's kind of like the new windows and expecting to see differently if you don't have a background of seeing. I think that that's one of the key skills of designers. We learn how to see. That's what we're taught. We learn how to see, we watch, we understand. We read shapes and forms, and that's an important part of the input, and it's equally an important part of the output. So that's where I think this design doing comes in. You have to be able to craft something that expresses that need. Because I used to talk to my students about, well, we need to understand. We have to see what it means. And then we have to understand what that means, make that interpretation between the observed to the meaning of that thing, and then you have to decide what to make or do as a result. And that's not an easy thing to learn. And it takes a lot of practice. And I think it's the hardest part of the design process. It's making that understanding what it means and what the implications of that are for people and the thinkers. You're going to craft
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That setting off light bulbs for me. I don't know if you could see that as you were speaking. I was thinking this notion of seeing then thinking, then doing. It's a nice see, think, do kind of structure to it. But it made me think of back at business school of strategy tactics and implementation or operations. And it's almost like perhaps design thinking is being confused with the seeing or the strategy where it's actually, yeah, it's actually just the thinking, the tactical thinking part. Yeah, it sounds like you agree. Yeah, I think
- Shelley Evenson:
- So. Yes. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- About the role of design. Thinking here, again, I'm not sure if this has played a role, but there seems to have been for a long time, at least since the gfc, there was an explosion of designers being hired and design was touted as being one of the key sources of competitive advantage that firms could latch onto and use. Yet there's so many designers at the moment open to work. It's almost sad. Looking through my LinkedIn, every third person seems to be displaying one of those green open to work badges. What's your sense from your position of leadership as to what designers are likely to face over the coming 12 to 24 months, as with regards to opportunities in the job market?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Well, I think we're in for kind of a rough patch before the up uptake of goodness. That's not very eloquent. But what I mean is that I think that the technologies on the horizon are going to create a new kind of demand for really great designers, you might say, oh wow, the big companies are going to realize that they can just do everything designers did with ai, but they can't. They're just tools. It is going to be hard to get through the storm, but what's going to be fundamental is that companies will need to get back to their purpose, what their core competencies are, and actually work harder on that. And so you need those people who can do design research, who can do the design and reflect that in a really powerful way. So I think it's really unfortunate that this is happening. I think it's shortsighted.
- I think what happened is what big happens in big company ecosystem kind of dynamics, which is one company did it, and so it gave other companies the permission to do it as well. I'm not an HR person. I don't pretend to even be close, but I would say that there are natural dynamics in all systems, and so you can expect some ebbs and flows. But I do think a lot of it came from not a need to actually reduce, but that they felt like, ah, this is the time we made a mistake. We don't have to be irresponsible to these people. We can just go with the market.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if you were to put yourself in the shoes of a mid-career designer who is looking at a career that's still in flight, but there's going to be some turbulence or may have already been experiencing some turbulence, what would you be focusing on?
- Shelley Evenson:
- I think it is really the passion for continuous learning and to be willing to step out of what it, and try new things and be willing to work to learn, I think is a path to go. It's easy to say, of course, but my kids graduated from school when there was another big downturn and it was really tough, and I felt terrible for them because both of my kids are designers and my whole family is actually in the design community. But
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are affected more than most when these sorts of things happen.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, exactly. But luckily they've all been fine. But I think having that sort of attitude that it may not be exactly what I want, but I can work to learn and find ways to make that whatever that experience is really valuable to my personal growth.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That ability to think and act laterally in situations where they're not necessarily the perfect conditions, I think is a valuable skill, albeit a very difficult one as you've touched on there for people to grasp. Hold on. Yeah. I want to come to something slightly different now, which is something that may give designers a reason to pause, and it's something that you said about the work that we do that I thought was really intriguing. And I'll quote you again now. You said, I really believe that service designers are meta designers. We are designing for the experience, not designing the experience. So I always have big issues with people who say that we are designing the experience. No, we can't do that. So what is the practical difference between designing the experience and designing for the experience and how does that change the way in which we should approach our work?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I and my, I've had a long, long standing debate with Nathan Shera on this point. He says, I'm absolutely wrong, and I think he's absolutely wrong.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, Nathan, it's now your chance to have it from Shelley.
- Shelley Evenson:
- I think it's so presumptuous to think that we can design people's experiences. I think one of the things that I learned when I learned service design was that we create affordances. We create the evidence that people read and interpret to do what they want to do. And I can shape those things and I can hope that they'll experience them in a particular sequence, but are they're not to be controlled. And an example of that that I think is really telling, it goes back to the early days of the iPhone, and I remember standing in line, I was teaching at card nine when the iPhone came out. I stood in line and a really hot June day. It was fabulous. They had totally orchestrated the experience. They orchestrated it, they couldn't control it, but they orchestrated it. They had water for people, they had vouchers for food, so that people, you were standing online for a longer period of time.
- You walked in, you made your purchase, they shook your hands when you came out. It was fabulous. So fast forward to the next version of the iPhone. I was in a different city. I was in Boston, and I went into a wonderful flagship store in Boston, and I got in line, and there was a person who decided that because I was casually dressed, obviously I was not important. He had a suit on, he should be able to go in front of me. And he just started jumping the queue and I said, wait, what's going on here? And I motioned to one of the Apple people and they said, oh, well, we can't get involved in managing the queue. And I was like, what? Well,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's chaos.
- Shelley Evenson:
- So to me, it was a really great example of they had orchestrated all of these situations so well, they had performed it so well, but the context was that there was a jerk, a guy who just thought he was more important than all of us and decided he was going to skip the cue and they wouldn't do anything about it. So my experience was dramatically different the second time, even though they had crafted all of the resources in very similar ways, it wasn't successful. So yeah, it's an old story, but I think it really illustrates the fact that all design is contextual, all experience is contextual, and you can shape those resources. But you don't know what my experience has been. I don't know what that guy's experience has been, why he acted that way. Yeah, I mean, he can't design the experience.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- He might have just come from a funeral and was in a particularly foul mood. There are so many things exactly that could have been going on there. He could have just been an actual jerk through and through. It's hard to say, but what you're talking about here is illustrating the need also for design to be iterative. As much as it's contextual, it is iterative in the sense that when things happen that you didn't afford for in the system that you're designing or the experience you're trying to orchestrate, having that feedback loop into the next time that there's a release of an iPhone and knowing that people may behave by jumping the queue gives you at least the ability to better influence what that experience is going to be like if that happens again.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, totally. Iteration is key. We have to keep growing, growing and changing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The sad reality is I suspect that many design projects iteration has talked about at the outset and very rarely ends up being the case once it's in market. I agree.
- Shelley Evenson:
- I agree.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, we won't dwell on that for too long because that could take us down as pressing path. Shift it up a little bit now. And the iPhone was recalling for me your talk where you were talking about signals and the role that signals play in helping us in design and also more broadly in our organizations to understand what might be coming, what the future might look like. Now, I understand that the term signals, you had referenced it from the Institute for the Futures, and they describe it as a local disruption that may indicate a more widespread disruption is coming. And I know that Steve Ballmer at Microsoft didn't perceive the iPhone as being one of these very strong signals that disruption was coming, and that was reflected in the Microsoft share pricer across that period, which of course now there's a resurgence under such a, but anyway, I'm getting sidetracked here.
- I wanted to give people just two examples from your talk that illustrate signals in different ways. And one of them was back in this talk was in 2018 where you referenced Pinterest founder Ben Silverman's, saying that we would all soon be searching using pictures rather than words. Now that clearly didn't happen, at least not yet. I mean, maybe it's just a case of timing. Who am I to say? And yet, on the other hand, you also reference in that talk another signal, which was the growing use of emojis in business communication, which is clearly now become pervasive, including in my show notes for this podcast, they get used possibly a little too much. I might need to pull it back. So from your perspective of where you are in Accenture song and the types of engagements that you have had across your time there and at Fjord and all the previous time you've had in the industry, what is it that helps you to separate what is signal from? What is noise? Is it, is that even possible or is it really more a case of luck or making several bets? What is it in here that helps you to do that or to actually make sense of what might be something that becomes a meaningful reality?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I think it is really, it's hard to be able to do that. If we could predict the future, it would be awesome. I will, I would challenge you on the image search though. I can give you an example.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay. Yeah,
- Shelley Evenson:
- Please. We were on holiday in Los Angeles, and my kids really had liked this. I think it was a set of pillows that was in the Airbnb, and I said, oh, I know I've seen them. And so we use the image search for the pillow, and of course I found it. So there is a use case there that is really very broad. But going back to that, I think when we look for signals, we're really sort of doing a broad survey of the landscape. And then once you do that, I think the key is to see what are those real precursors out there in the world? And I know that I D L has talked about the edge cases before, so how do you find those edge cases where you have, I remember when I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon and we were looking at vehicles for General Motors, and we had a bunch of, I had a class of young women engineers, and we looked for who were those people who were sort of tricking out their cars in different ways and really seeing what the extremes of that tricking out are.
- So you may not see the actual manifestation of that signal, but you see components of that. One of the interviews we did, I'll never forget, we were doing a ride along and woman said, I see my car as an extension of my bedroom. And it was like, wow. So that really tells you that it's an intimate place. It's a place where you want to have softness and customization and all of these wonderful notions of what a bedroom means to a person. I can tell you that General Motors was pretty shocked by that comment, but it did give us a sense of how much more variability people wanted in the offerings that they got from the car companies. You see some of that now. You saw some crazy examples of it, but also I think the platformization of vehicles has helped a lot in being able to have the things that are the same, stay the same, and then being able to have for these wonderful differences.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We've come a long way from the Model C.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. You're touching on express ex people being able to express themselves. And this is somewhat tied back, I feel, to what you were talking about around the power we have, not necessarily to design people's experience, but to design the context for that experience and the personalization options now available in vehicles and the direction that footwear and other categories have gone. I suppose a really a recognition, strategic recognition of that drive within consumers to want to express who they are through the products and services that they're buying.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I think that's totally true. Honestly, when I first looked at Instagram, I was like, it's a perfect example of this personal expression. And it was a silly thing. They just had filters. It was like, but it was this first example of, oh wow, I can have a lot more control and I can feel more creative about what I'm presenting because I'm choosing one of these things and doing something to it and then presenting that out to the world. So yeah, I do. It's this personal expression as important.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Shelley Consulting businesses love to hypothesize about the future. There's obviously a reason for this. What is it about that that clients must love so much to make it worthwhile for consultancies to do it so much?
- Shelley Evenson:
- So one of the things that I've learned from clients over the years is that they're in their business. They know their business. If it's automotive, if it's consumer goods, if it's any variety of that, what they don't know is what other people in the other industries are doing because they want to be inspired just like everybody else. They want to learn what can we learn from what these other companies are doing? How do we take something that they have and translate it to our world? When my students were designing in healthcare, the whole thing there was to look at hospitality. Why can't your hospital experience be more like a hotel experience that you get the newspaper that you want, you can order the food that you want. And I think that that's what companies want to be able to do. They want to be able to take those adjacencies and learn how they could maybe twist them and apply them themselves. And so they always want us to bring these, the predictions or what we're seeing on the horizon and then help them translate it for themselves.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And one of those things that is now no longer on the horizon, it's here well and truly is ai. And it's one of the signals that you seem to have been keenly attuned to. And you've spoken about this for a few years in advance of it arriving in a big way recently. And you, you've recently written an article that's available on LinkedIn, and I'll link to it in the show notes that speaks specifically to AI and the role of designers within this new context. And you've said, and I'll quote you here, we are at a tipping point in a tech revolution that has the potential to transform the way we do everything. Generative AI will help us to co-create new products, services, and experiences. So reading that, it made me feel as if you were in the camp of we are better together, as in designers and AI are going to be better off together.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yes, I absolutely, I'm in that camp. I think that the power that you can see just in these small interactions with things like chat, G P T or any of the image generating tools, some are really awful. I can tell you that I'm not good with the image generating tools. Me neither. Terrible. I truly love the chat J p t and so much so that if you've been asking it to do interviews with people for me, so how do I create, if I think of a person in San Francisco who's having trouble deciding about which dog food to switch their dog to, I want to do an interview with that person and it creates an interview for you. It's clearly not real people data, but it does give you some clue about what are the patterns it's been able to read or not read, but be able to generate based on what it's been trained on.
- So I think it's really fascinating. I think as we use these tools, and I think they're going to be in pretty much everything we do. Reid Hoffman has says that there's going to be a co-pilot for everything, and he has a new startup company that's still in the south mode that is going to be augmenting human capability. But I think what's exciting for me is that it's going to sort of ladder up our learning. And by that, we know when we design and we iterate, things get better. We learn every time we make a change, and then test that change and test. And that's what you're doing when you're with the ai, when you're using the human plus the machine. And I believe it's going to help us see patterns way more effectively. It's going to help us branch out of the unexpected in ways that we may have never dreamed before. I think it's going to put all sorts of pressure on companies to really be about their purpose and to really, and because the other things, easy things are going to be taken of, it's kind of table sticks. That's what the AI can do with oversight, but it can do those things. What will truly differentiate companies in the future is really understanding what their purpose is and how they can take their core capabilities and really augment them with AI to really make them shine for the people that they want to serve. So yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned using CH G P T for an interview, like a fictional interview to try and I suppose it sounded like help you think through a scenario that you were investigating. You also mentioned there the augmentation aspect of this, the co-piloting, the ability for the designer or the human to interact with the machine, the AI in order to co-create. What reservations, if any, do you have that the previous context of designer, which is a human, let's say for now at least plus another human or humans co-creating is going to be subsumed or that there might be a proclivity to replace the human to human connection and to entirely augment that with the machine?
- Shelley Evenson:
- I think that's always a danger, but I think we have to remember that we are humans and that the AI is not, and what I think is going to be critical is that we bring back that really diverse team so that we can use what the machine is good for, and we can have people do the things that people are good at. And to me that's bringing together the data scientists with the psychologists, with the social scientists, with the designers, with all of that sort of wonderful cadre to get at the heart of what really matters. And you can't do that just with a person and a machine. We really need that diversity. And it's not to say that you didn't give me an idea that maybe I could suggest that, well, I want you response to be from a cognitive science perspective, and I want this response to be from an architect's perspective. And I might be able to get a little bit of the sense of what that could be like. But it's never really going to be what it's like to have real people in real settings collaborating and having that spark. And because there's so much nuance in language and so much of creating breakthroughs has to do with negotiating the meanings of the things that we're talking about. And it's that negotiation isn't going to happen with the ai, it happens with the people. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Maybe what I'm about to say is a little bit contentious or unfair on the technology and might paint me as a bit of a Luddite. And I just want to say that I have been completely captivated by chat G P T, and its ability to help me refine some of the things that I've been doing. So where I'm going with this is that I can't but help worry that cause it's so powerful and so easy for it to be playing the role of a user, for example, a synthetic person. It's kind of like a TV dinner versus preparing your own homemade food. We talk about the romance of being there with users and the richness of the communication and how we can't quite get that same experience otherwise. Yet, if you are really busy and you come home after a really stressful day, there's always that pull towards the convenience aspect, the frozen meal that you can just heat up in two minutes. And so I have concerns that our business, our wider business culture is largely one of seeking efficiencies. And this tool, no matter how marvelous it is at finding patterns, it's doing it in such a way that is at the speed of light as far as most of us are concerned. It's going to be very difficult to resist the pool to supplant some of the practices that we've built up and design research with something that is just so easy. It's almost like a sugar rush.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I think it's a concern. It definitely is a concern, but I think that just like when students used to ask me, how do I convince my client or whomever to do the research, I'd say you give them a taste of what it could be. And so I would hope that, yeah, we might get some frozen personas, but it can give us pointers at just how diverse the need might be and how important it's to really validate that in the world. Because if there are signals that these things might be important and you can get diverse enough signals, then you can justify it. But I worry too, I worry about the quality. If you can generate an image that's okay, that to me it's not enough. It's got to be a great image, it's got to be great. And I think that the tools can help us get there, but I think it's not without worry.
- And I think we have a practice within Accenture specifically and responsible AI for that very reason. It's critical. I think the other thing that's going to be important for us to continue to grow as designers, as human beings is the whole explainability side and understandability, why did it choose to compress that part? Why is this piece from my article highlighted and not this other one? Or how do I know what the source of that image is? It can you trace the providence? So there's all sorts of questions that we still need to address and we need to think about it really carefully. We need to design our response to these technologies and not just kind of jump in. And that's my fear. And that's why I really felt that writing the article was important, that designers can help. We're not the answer, we're part of the answer, but we can help in these ways and bringing in the responsibility and designing for people and helping organizations really sort of get to the things that are their essence and crafting entirely new kinds of experiences for people to interact with these things. So I'm an optimist, but I'm not without worry.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's clear from what you were saying and from what we've been seeing that the world is entering a new ethical gray zone as far as AI is concerned, and in particular in the creative domains. And I know you took a shoot with the word creative, I mean the commercially creative domains of design, but also the art domain of art as well. There's obviously copyright concerns that people have about works of literature and of art that are out there that these algorithms are working with. Now, you've said something about this, this was going back a few years back to that 2018 talk, which is we have the power to improve people's lives really dramatically through service design, but with great power comes great responsibility. Is it really ethical for the travel bot to be working with the real agent and you not knowing we have to be thinking about these kinds of questions and what it means to be doing this kind of work in service design. Why does it matter to me the person that's experiencing that service, whether or not I know if there's a machine interacting with me or if it's a human isn't getting to a positive outcome as efficiently as possible? For me, the consumer, the most important thing here.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Oh, yes. And I still think that ethical research, ethical practices, aligning to values is fundamental. And I don't like the notion that we might be tricking people even if they don't care if they're tricked. I feel like it's our respect for others that comes to the fore and why that's important. You wouldn't want to do it to a child, you wouldn't want to do it to anyone. I wouldn't even want to do it to my dog, trick them in an sort of unethical way. It's really, I think, fundamentally human value that we have to go back to. And it's part of why I became a designer in the first place is cause I wanted to do good work to make people's lives better. And efficiency is only one component. Truth and honesty is another.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I can't help but wonder if there's an element of this where the technology is still so new and almost magical still that the role of disclosure is one that is more important in the current moment than it may be in future moments. And an example of this that I'm thinking of is if you think about banking and the way in which it's all gone digital and the last decade or so, there's no instruction manual that comes along for us as consumers to tell us exactly how the money moves and how it's represented on our devices as in our balances. There's a journey that has happened over time where we've become more comfortable with the technology, with the digitization of services and the way in which we are in the world that some of that initial rejection or fear or lack of understanding has faded with passage of time and with use. So I wonder if it's a here and now concern that may end up becoming less so as people better understand the way in which the technology is working.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah, I think you're probably right. I think that people will always may want to know what the providence of an image is and cause of how copyright and all of that. Yes, I think that it may be less so and how some the AI is working, but I may want to be able, if I want to encourage the learning and understanding of the technology, then I think exposing is helpful. I think we have a lack of fluency in data and analytics, and I think that the more that we can expose and provide the scaffolding for people to learn, the better off we're going to be as a collective.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So related to this notion of understanding how the AI being used, what the inputs and what its limitations are. In your article you wrote, and I'll quote you now without checks and balances in place, Melissa Hek and MIT's tech review suggests we may be witnessing in real time the birth of a snowball of bullshit. That's very true. We invest a lot of trust in the data sets that these ais are working from without fully really understanding just how good or accurate those are. So how can designers, and maybe this is a sort of midterm view to be taken here, but how can we make sure if we are consulting designers, that our clients, or even internally, to be fair, because design plays a consultative role inside organizations often as well, how can we make sure that our clients or our stakeholders know what is bullshit and what is not bullshit?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Yeah. Well, again, I think it goes back to that traceability in the data sets. A former colleague from my science days as a company called Emilio, and they're using blockchain to do the traceability. And I think some version of that, I would say that we have no idea at this point when we're using church p t, I don't know when I'm using Bing. I don't know. I don't even know in the old fashioned Google, considering Google is old fashioned, how do I know that that's valid, right? And the information that I'm being provided is correct. I remember early on in the early web days where you would get back information, you'd go, that's a complete lie. I was like, where did this come from? So I think that's always going to be a concern. And we always have to be really careful and responsible with the data, do the appropriate anonymization and make sure that we're getting the benefits without the harms.
- But it's not easy, I think. But again, it's one of those responsibilities that we have. If we're going to play with this stuff, we have to be willing to take on the hard parts of this, making sure that what we're using is good and sound. And honestly, like I said, I think we have no idea, but shot J P T and the open ai, what it's been trained on everything. And so there's good and there's bad in that. I think we'll find new ways to actually work with good and bad and figure out how to validate against that. So it's early still, it's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's tricky,
- Shelley Evenson:
- Even though it's like it was the fastest growing web application and history, I guess they said. So yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it seems like every so often there are these leaps forward. And it's definitely been one of the first times in recent memory that I can remember feeling genuine excitement and a little bit of trepidation about what it was that I was experiencing. It's not really me that I was, so my perspective that I thought was valid here, it was when I put it in front of family members that aren't so involved in the technology industry and witnessed their reactions to it, it certainly confirmed for me that this is something that clearly is going to change the way in which we are in the world. It's a very exciting time. And when it comes to a technology like this, whether it was social media in the previous wave of technology or whether it's ai, it seems that as far as the designs of products and services and a context that's making use of these technologies goes, there's not always a case for using something just because we can use it.
- And you referenced in one of your talks, Regina Duggan, talking about Facebook, wanting to use neural imaging technology to scan the human brain to understand what people intend to say before they say it so that they don't have to say it. Now, while I appreciate the science fiction and the motivation behind doing that, the technological achievement that would represent, it feels to me like that would be opening a Pandora's box of sorts. So what perspective or bounds, if any, do you think that companies and perhaps designers or management consultancies, if I can go that far, that consult to these organizations and have some influence in their strategies and what they do? What should they adhere to, if anything, when it comes to the design of new products and services in terms of the boundaries that they put around the go or no go zones of the technology?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Wow, I, I'm leaning towards just saying it comes back to what I said before. It comes back to value and values. Like the danger if it's too valuable for the organization and it doesn't align with human values is that organizations are going to go there anyway. And I'm not sure that that's not already happening. And I guess that's the Facebook example from back in the day. I know what that was intended for originally, and it's not something that we would want to think about. I think we're in for some really interesting times, I would say. And I just hope that there are people who are willing to stand up and our governments are willing to stand up and be what governments are supposed to be for the people, the protectors and the people, the aids for the people, and stand for the values of the people that they serve and help us not make many bad mistakes. But I think it's going to be hard.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a key point that you are making, not just about the difficulty of trying to find our way through what is a little bit of a murky territory at the moment, but also the role that government plays in ensuring that what happens in our society is to the benefit of all people in our society. And as Bob Dylan once famously said, times, they are a changing. And you've previously spoken about how the language of a service changes over time and by language you were talking or you were taking a broad perspective of an entire dance that a customer does with an organization to achieve the outcome. So that whole journey that they're on, and the case of banking, which we just touched on a little bit earlier, clearly that's been an area of our economy or our service experience that is digitized over recent years. And you've said about this in reference to your own family. My parents knew what to do when they went into the bank. They had a conversation with a person. And what we've done is we've introduced new languages for banking. So what responsibility, if any, do companies have to ensure that people aren't left behind this wave of technology that's coming and are still able as a result of that change to fully participate in our society and our democracies as technology trans transforms our services?
- Shelley Evenson:
- That's a great question. We all play a part. The people that we choose to be our officials and the time that we take to understand what that's going to mean, even the time that we take to choose the organizations we work for and understand that many of these organizations have so much more power than the organizations of old and to, I really appreciate those people who are willing to speak out when they see injustice and people who are willing to find ways to bring people along. I think we can skill up people, we can give them a sort of intelligence literacy. And I think it's needs to start early on when with our kids, and it needs to continue along with our older people who don't have that willingness to lean in because it is frightening in many ways. It can be magical, but it can be frightening. And I think that, yeah, I don't have a great answer, except that we just need to be human in all things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a great and important place and point to finish on. Shelley. I've really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and your insights with me. And thank you also for your outstanding leadership and contributions to the field of design over what has been and continues to be a really stellar career.
- Shelley Evenson:
- Well, thank you, Brendan. This has been lovely. I really enjoyed the conversation as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, it's been my pleasure. And Shelley, if people want to find out more about you, about the work that you're doing at Accenture Song, any of your other contributions to the design community. What is the best way for them to do that?
- Shelley Evenson:
- Just reach out to me on LinkedIn and I will respond.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Shelley.
- Shelley Evenson:
- For them to do that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- 100% to everyone that's tuned in. It's been great having you here as well. Everything that Shelley and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Shelley and all of the things that we've spoken about.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX design, UX research, product management, please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so it turns up weekly. Give it a review as well if you've enjoyed the conversation and passed it along to people in your network that you feel that would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or there's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes as well, or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz, and until next time, keep being brave.