SXSW 2018 - From Futuristic Product Designs to Design-thinking Approaches

#1 — Tech Trends

Amy Webb, Founder of Future of Today Institute

Download Tech Trends Report here

Takeaways from the talk:

Pay attention to trends inside and outside your industry. The trend might not be in your industry now, but it will in the future and it’s better to realise that earlier than later.

ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) are the new IPOs. 

The chairman of Uber is starting his own crypto company.

What’s trendy and what’s a real trend? Real trends are...

• Driven by basic human needs
• Timely, but persist over time
• Trends are static, they evolve
• Emerge often as outliers
• Usually hard to encapsulate in a buzzword
• It may not seem to be important at first
• Usually start out with the thoughts: “Never heard of it” “not relevant” “it’s a novelty” 

"Consider all trends to understand the future of individual trends."

Future of Today institute utilises pattern recognition to recognize trends, you can too, to recognise trends within your products.

Making connections between trends can produce valuable insights.

2018 is the beginning of the end of smartphones.

Smart glasses will be a thing.

"50% people will use voice by 2021."

Machine reading comprehension will improve with more direct, comprehensible answers.

Voiceprints will be used to read:

• Age, health, emotional state
• What room you’re in
• How many people in the room
• Fluctuations in electrical grid
• Your rough location

Thumbprints will subside over the next decade.

Face prints will become more comprehensive:

• data your face shows
• data underneath your face

Measure signal of heart state from video of face or other exposed skin:

• Heart rate (can currently be measured from a long distance of around 50 meters with a dslr camera or 2 meters with a webcam)
• Respiration
• Heart rate variability (arousal, stress)
• Blood oxygen saturation

Generate predictive videos from images.

You can ‘Smile to pay’ in China. Alibaba.

China will Social shame people. I.e. when jaywalking it will post your profile on a billboard in that location, and shame you via your profile on social media.

ANI: artificial narrow intelligence. Does something simple, that a human would, very well.

NasNet: outperformed systems that were made by humans.

"Data is the next oil."

Companies and governments will find more value in mining data than anything else.

Biology is the most important platform of the century. (Crispr)

Biological DVR - record and store information about our cells as they age

Precision medicine.

Single stranded origami.

Plug and play nanomedicine.

Human cell atlas.

#2 — Scaling Design Systems: Pixels to People

4 Panelists from Google, Airbnb, Microsoft and IBM

Takeaways from the talk:

Airbnb’s design system:

• 2 years old (as of March 2018)
• 5k designers

Considerations when building a design system

"Track and measure the health of your design system in order to evolve it."

• Include a ‘where it’s being used’ section for each component.
• Crowd-sourcing the updates. 
• Inclusion from other departments.
• Inclusive rather than accessible. By including others, rather than just making it accessible.
• Designing a system for designers.
• Attribution or credit for participating.
• Lots of feedback, back and forth.‍
• Lona - by Airbnb
• Connectivity - relationships and trust to be open to say anything. No judging, no bad idea.
• Conway’s Law - a reflection of the way the company is organized.
• Creative confidence by Tim brown
• Telemetry.

#3 — Facts, Truth, and Data Visualization

Scott Berinato of Harvard Business Review

Takeaways from the talk:

Data visualisation has become a common way for us to communicate and argue a point, however we need to keep in mind that data visualisation is often used as a tool to manipulate users perspective on what the data is saying.

"All data tells a story, but the designer chooses how to tell it."

• Every chart is a manipulation.
• Every chart is a tool.
• Range, space, colour, form, text, marks, conventions can all be used to alter the users perception of the data presented.
• Data vis using the same data will hold the same facts, but still represent different truths.
• Data vis is used to evoke emotion and connection to data.
• User’s can’t remember the actual data, but they do remember how they felt when viewing it.
• Data vis is used to make sense of the world around us.
• Account for gestalt theory principles and how they might be sending signals to your readers that you didn’t intend.
• Gestalt can also be utilized to produce valuable charting methods. 
• Designers are used to manipulate data.
• Data visualisation is extremely powerful and impactful.
• Clutter and mess looks shady and suspicious.
• Good chart designers are great chart readers.
• Data visualization should always be read as data.
• Good chart design is easy to understand, presents data clearly and isn’t misleading.
• Machines can’t replace the human layer of giving the correct context to a chart.

Good data visualisation allows the user to see and feel the data in a way that educates the user and provides an unbiased perspective and doesn’t hide data or skew the perspective to serve the creators own interests.

"Facts aren’t the whole truth, they are just part of the truth."

The story behind the Takata engineer is an example of how all of the important data was presented, but it was presented in a misleading way that prevented stakeholders from realising the intensity of the story behind the data and caused a lot of people to lose their lives.

#4 — Leading for a Culture of Innovation & Creativity

David Aycan of IDEO

Takeaways from the talk:

1. Purpose

• Profit is a measure of a companies success (is it?)
• Clarity, repeated, acted on
• Actionable
• Aligns with individuals personal purpose
• Startups that have a good purpose are 20% more likely to succeed
• ‘Reimagine fashion for the good of all’
• ‘Zero out the waste with fast fashion’
• Use it as a prime factor in all major decisions

2. Looking Out

• Understand emerging technologies and how they effect your industry
• Do it at least once a month
• Startups that ‘look out’ are 25% more likely to succeed
• Observe 3 people dealing with the issue you’re working on

3. Experimentation

• Prototype, gather insights, iterate  
• Exploring and testing 5+ ideas in parallel are 50% more likely to succeed
• Give anyone an idea to move forward, and they will become protective of the idea
• We are social, we will hold back on real raw feedback the longer something is worked on
• Have an idea? Come up with 3 more before you get feedback.

4. Collaboration

• Teams with daily collaboration across functions are 38% more likely to succeed
• Who might bring a new perspective? Talk to them for an afternoon.

5. Empowerment

• Provide autonomy and clarity of focus for 69% likeliness for success

#5 — The Power of Ideas to Transform the World is Accelerating

Ray Kurzweil of Google

Takeaways from the talk:

• Every aspect of humanity is getting better.
• We have more information about what’s wrong for the world.
• Easy access to bad need, because it is important for survival. And more interesting. 
• “AI is more dangerous than nuc’s” Elon Musk
• You have to be an optimist to be an entrepreneur.

"Computers will be inside our bodies, it’s already happened."

You want to remove bias but also not censor it too much.

What if one person is couragous, intelligent and compassionate enough to change the world. What if we thought like Danielle, to positively impact the world.

A chronically of ideas. 

Augmented intelligence

Neocortex - site and hearing.

Synthetic neocortex in the cloud, that will connect to our neocortex in the human body.

We’ll become a hybrid of biological and non biological neocortex.

Augmented creativity.

Singularity

Being empathetic is the cutting edge of human intelligence. (When comparing to ai)

"Nanotechnology - in the bloodstream, extend the immune system, extend intelligence."

Fundamentally AI learns from humans. There are efforts to try to correct biases that occur in software. It is an ongoing issue. it’s the same thing with a child. A child learns from the people around him or her, and the role of education is to provide the values that we espouse in society. 

"Agriculture is on the brink of a big change with vertical agriculture and meatless farming."

Agriculture and transportation are going to change a lot, but also AR and VR is going to have a big impact. We’re going to be able to do everything we do when we are physically together without needing to be physically present.

3D printing will really get interesting. We will be increasingly able to create the physical things we need.

Full transcript of the conversation here.

#6 — From AI to EI: Empathy is the New Tech Superpower

5 Panelists from IPG, Barcelona Technology School, OpenMarket, The Empathy Business & Techfugees

Takeaways from the talk:

The more we are connected digitally the less we are in life.

Empathetic interactions.

The environment you’re in depicts how much empathy you’re exposed to.

Everyone has a different amount of empathy. 

Empathy without ethics is empty empathy that can be used for negative, unauthentic uses.

Empathy is about understanding what the user is doing and adapting to it. i.e. utilizing the platforms they are already using, instead of adding another layer to an already complex world.

Provide meaning through: 

• Clarity
• Mindfulness
• Diversity
• User centric design process

The power of silence. Disconnect to reconnect with yourself. Then new things will arise. Recognizing and activating the frontal cortex.

Collaboration, agile, working together, active learning, innovating, connecting to the user’s and creating meaning.

Experience more in the real world 🌎 

UX is a frame of mind.

A great UX Designer is like a great actor / actress.

• Regular, research, release. 
• Become the user

"$1 invested in UX $100 return."

Respondents were strongly tied to an emotional response after viewing the VR.

VR tool to show the suffering of others.

"AI can help us remove our human biases."

Making sure the AI isn’t coded with biases, and imbed ethics into the AI.

#7 — Animation in UX: Subconscious Influence of Motion

Katie Swindler UX Strategist of Allstate

Takeaways from the talk:

Conference calls miss all of the queues of a good interaction.

Animation with purpose vs animation with personality.

"Using motion to convey stories within a user’s journey, convey character and personality."

For purpose:

• Fogg behavioral model
• Clear connection
• Less clutter
• Perception of speed

Less motivation and more difficult = failure

More motivation and more ease = success

Animation can create clearer communication:

• Draw a line between two places to provide a connection
• Tapping into their spatial reasoning
• I.e tapping 
• I.e timing by showing the relationships between two objects to display hierarchy
• Use tricks to expand the 

"Use animation to reduce mental clutter."

Perception of speed:

• Optimistic UI (continue the flow while the system is 
• Assume success of your system
• Move onto the next step so the user’s experience isn’t disrupted
• Load objects on the page from top to bottom

Creating a narrative:

• stories are 22x more valuable than facts alone
• Celebrate progress

***have something flashing for more than 3 seconds you could cause damaging effects***

“Brand is a decision making tool” - Vin Reed, brand strategist

Bring branding traits into animation.

I.e. confident, down to earth, smart, helpful, expert, informal (but not slipping), simple declarative, clean.

Keep animation on brand.

Nike animation = fast, moving forward, speedy, 

Movement like a Houston Ballerina = precise, smooth, landed.

Human-like interactions = fluid, yet imperfect, rhythmic, slightly halted, moment of recognition.

Respected interactions = slow, timely, very contextual (sometimes slow, sometimes fast and auctioning)

Animating the building of the user’s home to visualize their progress and confirms their decisions. More emotionally attached to the form.

Pick a real problem to solve that contributes to a business objective.

Play to animations strengths.

Weighted shortest job first.

#8 — Tech & Humanity, Embedding Empathy in Experience

Jon Wilkins from Karmarama 

Takeaways from the talk:

• Do the right thing by your customers leads to outstanding results.
• Offer things that surprise and delight.
• “Technology is affecting how we think as humans”
• “Decreased sensitivity to emotional cues”
• “Technology is depressing the creativity in our minds”
• 80% companies believe they deliver great customer experiences, yet only 8% customers agree.
• A lot of technology and AI execution is plain creepy.
• Ai can assist customer service, but not to the complete absolution to humans.
• “Brands are only as strong as their weakest link” - Martin Riley

"Technology second, humanity first."

• The disrupters are winning, because they’re doing things better.
• Take your internal purpose and project it outwards.
• Purpose driven/human/tech-second companies grow faster than those that don’t.
• Satisfied and able to perceive brand differentiation.
• What’s the deeper human purpose.
• “This is belonging” isn’t the British army’s internal purpose. 
  
  

More Notes

Official SXSW 2018 Notebook — Here you can find content captured by Evernote’s team of note-takers.