Kemp Atwood on Design as a System for Value

From the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, this is the Design Thinkers podcast. Design thinkers is Canada's largest graphic design conference. Since the year 2000, the RGD has been bringing together visionaries from a range of disciplines to explore creativity and the design process. Join our host and RGD president, Nicola Hamilton, as she sits down for casual and candid conversations with design thinkers, speakers, both past and present. This week, on the Design Thinkers podcast, I'm joined by Kemppatwood, partner at Area 17. With a background in creative writing and new media design, Kemp has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of design, strategy, and technology. He's helped shape Area 17's global vision, leading interdisciplinary teams across Paris and New York, to deliver transformative work for clients like the New York Times, Google, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Canada. In this episode, we dive into how design is more than just crashed. I would become the system for delivering real value. Kemp shares his thoughts on behavioral branding, the rise of hyper-personalized UI, what AI tools get right, and wrong, and why making is still one of the best ways to think. We also talk about long-term client relationships, running a distributed global team, and how a hundred-plus office plants became part of the Area 17 ecosystem. Whether you're deep in digital design, or simply curious about how strategy, brand, and interface collide, this one's packed with thoughtful ideas, a few laughs, and a whole lot of wisdom. Let's dive in. Hello. How's it going? Let's dive in. I'm glad I'm glad we get a chance to do this, and I'm glad that we get to hang out as design thinkers in the fall. That'll be fun. Yes, it's gonna be great. We're excited to have you. Excited to be back. Yeah, one was the last time you were in Toronto. I've been back in Toronto a bit fairly recently within the last year a few times, but yeah, design thinkers was what, 2018. Last time I was at the conference, yeah. Yeah, I have that talk title here somewhere, which was all about storytelling. It was about storytelling, and it was really about how interface is user interface is a component of storytelling, where I think we tend to think about narrative-like exposition as story, but really it was about how the user interacting with a website with an app is a big part of the story that they're creating with you and with your brand and your company. It was storytelling as an engagement versus a narrative as it were. Yeah, well let's roll that back. Let's sort of stick on the storytelling thing for a second, but you actually have your undergrad was a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in literature from York, and then you went on to do a post diploma certificate in new media design from the Bell Center for Creative Communications in Toronto. And you've said, I've heard you say in the past that you went into literature just because you loved stories. You loved stories generally. Why study new media after that? So I guess during the when I was in school in New York, as you mentioned in Toronto, I was also getting kind of interested in design just through, you know, it was kind of admin of the web in many ways, you know, the more popularization of people getting online and things like that. And so there was this whole new kind of world opening up that was obviously very different from the kind of storytelling that I went into school to study. I was, you know, avid reader, very deep into literature, and maybe I would at one point be, you know, writing stories and poems and and or being a teacher in a university. But this new kind of world that I entered and started to play with just really fascinated me. And I'd always always always always been interested in the visual nature of things. I mean, even to the point where some of my love of literature was love of books, the object, the covers, you know, and that kind of thing. So so I think what drew me in was this capacity to to bring words and images together and to create a space that people could interact with in some way, you know, and I don't necessarily in the way of choose your own adventure story, but just in the way of having some license to go forward, go backward and to find your way through it. Yeah, it's funny, sort of engaging with the internet is almost like engaging with your audience in real time, especially now that we have all this like data collection where we can actually see how people move through the worlds that we're creating. Yeah, one of the, I mean, this probably was, I introduced this in the talk in 2018, but it's just in a foundational component of our firm since the beginning, which is that action speak louder than words. And so that means that the internet or, you know, in our case, really this integration of brand experience and technology, then all coming together into a point of interaction between a company or, you know, an organization and a customer or a user is actually the point where the brand comes to life, where, you know, we call this behavioral branding, but it's really where you get the proof is in the pudding as it were. It's where your brand really shows up, whether or not it's what you wrote in your manifesto or not, that's where it really comes to fruition. Yeah, it's funny. Having all of that extra information like being able to actually see the actions feels like a good thing most of the time and every once in a while I wonder what we're missing because we're only focused on the info we can see. How do you mean? I think I think about how little we knew in the past, right? I think about the physical objects that we're creating and selling and putting into the market and I think about how little we used to know about what happened to those objects when they actually entered someone else's life orbit when they went on to sort of fulfill the promise, the purpose of that thing and how little we knew until we started asking questions. Yeah, I mean, it is very interesting. I mean, I think back to, you know, I think one of the, one of the things that got me interested in design is really modernism. You know, I was super interested in chair design for some reason. I mean, I guess as designers, that's, you know, somehow the holy grail. I don't know why. I worked, I interned at the design exchange in Toronto when I was going to school and they, I mean, they have, or had at least a pretty big archive of chairs and I did a little project in, you know, in my studies on some chair designers and kind of the top 10 designs of Canadian chairs. And I think that there's something about that that time, the Bauhaus, you know, the shift to function where there was, you know, while we didn't maybe, you know, have the data of how things were being used in people's lives, you know, post, sale, et cetera. There was this, there was this real shift to the purpose and intention of what those products were, how they were going to live. And so I think it was kind of the advent in some ways of, you know, user research and kind of putting the user at the center of, of what the actual product and its life, you know, in someone's experience is going to be. Yeah, yes, I just think about how lovely it was that at one point we actually had to go and ask those people. And in some processes we do still go and ask those people versus just having access to that info. No, that's exactly right. And I think that, you know, I think that's really interesting. I mean, so we go directly to users and customers as much as we can. And I think that we don't always get that opportunity partly because of budgets, partly because. Pace. Yeah, exactly. The modern world. And it's getting, I think what's interesting is it's getting in the way that you're positioning it's getting worse while it can also get better in the sense that like, you know, I know that there are organizations who create, you know, UI or AI personas and they query the AI personas. So they're creating, you know, like you said, it's not just using the data. Now it's using the data to create almost a, the perception that we're actually asking direct people how it's going to live in their life, what they want, you know, what their needs are, et cetera. So it's almost an additional layer of abstraction. Well, let's hang out there for a second. So Area 17 just published their summer 2025 AI report. And I noticed that you're listed as an advisor. So how involved are you in some of those discussions that are happening in and around the agency? I'm very involved in the discussions. That report specifically came out of a couple of different things within the organization. So in 2019, OpenAI came to us for the relaunch of their website. Really, the purpose there was to introduce them to the general public for the first time. I mean, and in concert with that, it was really introducing AI to the world. I mean, you know, it was, I look back and I think, oh my goodness, like, you know, when it first came in, we weren't doing any of the things we're doing today. We weren't thinking in a way that we're thinking today. We didn't see the possibilities that we see today. And maybe that was short-sighted in this, but it was also just a lack of exposure. So I think, you know, so that really started us on a journey, obviously getting sort of this, you know, this early stage kind of understanding of both the risks and the opportunities of AI, that then, you know, you get the kind of work you do. And so the success of that brought in other AI organizations to for branding and for communications and marketing and some product design and helping introduce them into the world. So through this kind of exposure and having, you know, each one, and oftentimes, they had a branding component, thinking about what is this organization? How do they need to show up, you know, visual way, and how does that tie to their purpose and mission? So we did a lot of that work. One of our UX leads in Paris, Ivato has a background in semiotics and she did sort of semiotic research on not just the work we were doing, but the much wider landscape. And she kind of came up with these areas. And that was kind of the basis of then further research. George Dittatoc in Spain, our CEO and founder, Dittatoc in Spain, and kind of bringing these together and tying it with these cultural touch points. And I was there with him when he gave that talk. And so it's yeah. So my involvement is, you know, in the work in some ways and being part of each draft as it comes through and thinking through how we want to present this to the world. But there was a, as I'm sure you saw in the report, there was a pretty strong team altogether putting that up into the world. I think that there are also lots of other thinking that we're doing on AI that isn't encapsulated in that report that, you know, that we're thinking a lot about. Yeah, I mean, I think even the publishing of that report, right, asking the team to sort of get together and think about it. I mean, we're in this moment of such massive change that transparency and discussion are kind of the only way forward, right? To be able to have those conversations internally and then present it externally. You know, I think our partners need to understand the capabilities and limitations of that technology too. Absolutely. And I think, I mean, it's been, it's just been really great for us to to bring that thinking into one cohesive package as it were. We've gotten really good responses to it. It's beautiful visually. And I think it resonates, you know, but yes, exactly to your point. I think having a transparency, what are you thinking about, you know, just exposing as much information as possible, I think is really important right now because there are no answers. And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit as we think about what the future looks like. When you sort of think about it in the design context, like what, what are sort of the things you're thinking about about AI in that sort of graphic generation context? So I will say I don't think about it too much in the graphic generation context. I mean, I know and we've experimented with some of the sort of generative AI angles and, and, you know, we played with some of the early, you know, the early adoption tools, like Adobe, I can't remember what Adobe ended up calling their, their AI exposed. Firefly at the beginning. Firefly at the beginning, but they have, and they have a product in beta, which I think was called concept at the beginning that we played around with, which is more about, I think they, I think they've really said in beta, but I can't remember the name of it. But they, it's more about how does AI help you hone and create a concept, which I think is really interesting. So it's generative AI, but it's generative AI, you know, sort of more conceptual environment, sort of that early stage reference gathering and thinking, which is, I think, is really interesting and cool, which I think is maybe as it, as it relates to generative AI, more interesting. What I think, what I think is, so what I, what we're thinking about a lot is what the future looks like, you know, one or two steps removed, and who knows how fast it's going to come, but generative UI. So, you know, I think that the future is almost certainly going to be very personalized UI experiences through, whether it's, you know, through a more general AI and LLM of some version or, you know, branded spaces, a travel app, an airline, you know, what, what have you, and we're going to be moving away from this sort of designing of a single interface, going back to our comment about user research and whatnot. Instead of designing a single interface based on what we can learn or ask about a general group of people, and then designing a single interface that, you know, prioritizes who we heard the greatest needs from and, you know, takes these user groups and says, okay, well, this is the best version of this product based on what we know, we think. It's going to be much, much more personalized. It's actually going to be, well, this person has made these choices in the past. This is how they've interacted. And because of that, we're going to, on the fly, generate a UI that is hyper-specific to them. And that is, I think, you know, that's something that we're thinking about because, you know, there's a lot of talk about the end of websites, the end of screens and what's the future look like. I mean, you're talking to somebody who's heavily invested in print media and, you know, print has died the slowest death known to man, if it's dying. For 50 years, we've been talking about the death of print, and actually, it's seeing a resurgence. So it'll change. It's funny, though, you're talking about those sort of customized UIs, had me thinking about, like, really early versions of the internet, like, that were modular, that you sort of moved all the pieces around yourself. It had me thinking about early Facebook, early Myspace. Totally, where you had the control. And I mean, we've seen, you know, we've done so many websites and products that have, you know, the client might have come in saying, you know, let's say a museum website, we want to be able, we want the user to be able to customize A, B, C, and D. We want them to be able to create their own journey. We want them to create their own tour. And the adoption on those kinds of things is not high, let's say, in a general sense. You know, going back to the creating your Myspace or, you know, customizing your own profile and doing all these different things. But I think it is quite interesting to think about that happening based on your interactions and that it's super hyper personalized, but that you can then override. And, you know, so, oh, that's how that's what showed up because of this, I didn't think. But I'm going to override that. And I'm going to tweak. And it's sort of the the human and the system as it were versus having to do it all yourself. So I think there's something very interesting in that. You know, so you mentioned the end of print. And that's something I've been thinking about a lot, especially as it relates to the sort of end of websites or end of screens. You know, I think I actually had a client a few days ago who said to me like, yeah, but I mean, I mean, websites like, do we need them anymore? You know, and that's a big part of our business. You know, we in terms of our output, if you look at our output, you know, we make a lot of websites, build a lot of websites. Granted, we are also doing brand and strategy. And I'll get to that in a second. But so I think when we think about, you know, will the website exist in the future, which I think a lot of people are asking and saying, it's very similar to, you know, that, and that end of print narrative was, you know, that moment that we were talking about in my origin, you know, the Carson's end of print was one of the books I referenced back then, you know, that the internet was going to, you know, be the death now for publications. And as you said, and that would have been the mid 90s. That was the mid 90s, yeah. Yeah. We're actually the sort of narrative around death of print popped into sort of pop culture. In the mid 80s, talking about television, like why? Got it. Yeah. So that's another right going back to all of their step. Interesting. Yeah. The first time it was in pop culture was actually in the original Ghostbusters. Wow. I didn't know that. That's so interesting. I'm going to incorporate that because I am building a bit of a narrative around this, and I need to do more research. So it's very nice and superficial at the moment, but it is making a correlation between sort of this end of website, you know, or end of screen with the end of print. And of course, as you mentioned, the specialization that has then occurred because of, you know, because of the changes. So what is that specialization in the future? What is the difference? Yeah. Or how do you break through the noise when everyone's doing one thing? You know, I think, and just to just to tease that narrative out a little bit, you know, there was, and I think editorial is a big part of it and shopping and information is a big part of the narrative, but there was a time, you know, when RSS readers came out and Apple news and Facebook news that, you know, a lot of the publications were, okay, well, that's the end of our website presence. We don't have control over the data, or we don't have control over our brand in these spaces. And so that RSS readers were kind of this early stage like, oh, our websites are going to go away, everything is going to be aggregated. And then when Google created these clips, you know, where you can kind of get all the information that you're searching for, whether it's a movie or, you know, shopping, it just all appears in their own branded space and not yours. There was also the fear that, okay, well, IMDB, for example, doesn't need to exist because all the information is in Google and that's the depth. And so I think there are these sort of iterations of how technology is both, you know, consumed and distributed. And the new world order is yet to be determined, but I don't think it's the end of websites or the end of screens. But what is that future thing? It's quite interesting to think about. Even thinking about the news website, I mean, we've made a full pivot backwards, right? We've done a full 180 on that and that most people are actually going to web home pages now because what's being pulled into social media feels less trustworthy. Exactly. And I think that's what I think that's what's very interesting about that is that it's about brand. And so I think it gets back to this, you know, action speak louder than words of that interaction that you have with whatever, you know, a new source that you choose to kind of go directly to, you have a reason to trust that more than somewhere else. And I think that's really interesting. Again, I mean, when we were talking about botanese outlets so much or trustworthy ness when you're talking about more consumer products, the sort of community piece has continued to be the belonging or the sort of personal association with the brand has continued to get more and more important. Exactly. Okay, so I mean, this is all sort of tied in to my next question, but you're sort of leading both global design and strategy at Area 17. And I'm sort of curious like what it's like to actually lead both of those teams to be sort of in communication with both of those teams all the time. Do you feel like you're sort of putting your strategy hat on sometimes and your design hat on other times? Is it all we've together? Yeah, I mean, my role has, my role has evolved a little bit over the last six years, I would say, where I don't necessarily just lead or, you know, lead the design and strategy teams as a, as a kind of singular leader, as it were. So our structure is we have three partners, myself, George E. Dues of the Founder and Hannah Christworth, who's the Chief Operating Officer. And we kind of look at the whole business through, you know, lenses of craft impact and so on. And so as a, as a, as a three person kind of team, leadership, we're looking at the entire business through the lenses of craft impact and, and so on, which, and then we have at each, in each studio, we have managing directors who, who lead the day to day, who lead craft impact and so on, as it were at the local level. And so meaning that they're, you know, leading their local team. So my role is kind of threefold. One, it's kind of early stage partnerships and business development, you know, flat leadership, relationship building, and, and, and then also, you know, working with managing directors and the group directors and kind of the local teams on how we present ourselves and think about the conversion kind of journey, as it were. And, and the second part really is being principal on projects. And so as a principal on a project, I'm really involved in that early stage strategic thinking, being, you know, being brought in to look at the designs and kind of being more on that sort of consultant level to a, to project and client team, as it relates to strategy and design, but most specifically, but also has, as technology gets integrated into that. And the third is, is really looking at our overarching methods and practices for how we deliver value. So how could we be more effective at delivering value, how could we be more efficient in order to deliver more value? It's all, you know, it's all focused on how we can, you know, identify and create more value for our partnerships. But that's where I'm really kind of across all of the disciplines, helping the teams calibrate and, and create methods that, that help us be more effective overall. Yeah. So how much are you, are you getting your hands dirty? Do you get to make anything? So the thing, I don't make a lot of tangible outputs, certainly not for clients, but I make things as, as it relates to methodology. So I'm, you know, I'm constantly kind of drawing and thinking about how the different systems kind of come together to, to create ways of working and ways of thinking that help us be more effective and, and more valuable. And, and lately, I'm doing, I'm making, I try to make something every week for the last little while as it relates to just AI experiments. And how can I, you know, make a little gem or how can I make a custom GPT that just does something that I, that is useful that we need right now. And that's been a lot of fun, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us more about that about those experiments? Taking a little break here to remind you that this podcast is an extension of the Design Fingers conference. That's Canada's largest annual design conference hosted by the Association of Registered Graphic Designers. 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Sure, so I mean, you know, one, I think what I found very interesting, relatively recently, is just understanding that AI is pretty dumb when it comes to you and how you work and what you want to get out of it, but it has unbelievable amounts of knowledge. Someone recently kind of made the analogy that it's like you have someone with a PhD in everything, but it's their first day on the job. And so it's kind of like what that means is that if you can embed your point of view and your perspective and what it is you're trying to get into AI and into these little projects and experiments, you're going to get a much better result. So, you know, one of the experiments was super, super simple. Simply, we are, you know, as an organization, you know, really reinforcing our transformation to value and trying at every stage of our communication, internally and externally, to be translating our language of outputs we do we make, we are, to the value that's left behind, the outcome. And so it's sometimes it's difficult to write language in outcomes. It's difficult to think about, okay, well, this is what's left. This is the value when you're talking about it. So this little gem that I wrote was, you know, very simple just giving the instructions of how we understand an outcome versus an output. And you can feed it in and it gives you direction and it says, you know, here's what I would suggest you write and here's why this is an output, not an outcome. And so it's very simple, very small. Other experiments are just in terms of how much data can we put in and how much and what kind of queries can we get out of that. So, imagine, you know, account dashboards and things like that. How can these be helpful and functional? How can we improve our onboarding through these kind of data hubs that are empowered with AI? And in a few other, yeah, lots of other little things. It makes me think a little bit about like some of the sort of more generative AI experiments that writers and artists are doing where they have more ownership over the inputs, right? Like where it's not like a public input. It hasn't scraped the internet. They've actually chosen to input their own work into it and how they can get something out to the other side that's more useful to them. Exactly. Exactly. Homogenous space. Exactly. It's not just this open space, you know, it's really you're putting parameters around it. And I think, you know, as you know, coming back to that, coming back to the sort of generative UI future that many predict. And also tying in what you were saying about the return to editorial home pages, let's say, and the brand sort of trust that has been established there. One of the really big challenges that are going to come with that is how do brands show up when, you know, in the future, you can imagine that you might be in a more of an LLM environment, being able to do everything that a website can do, just like the RSS reader example that we talked about. And it's you're going to have all the same challenges as a brand. How does my brand show up? How do I govern that brand? How do I create the level of trust and connection when I don't have not only do I not have 100% control over what's being, you know, what's being displayed, but it's changing for multiple users and and all that kind of thing. So I think it's a very, very interesting question, very interesting space that requires us to create rules and parameters for how those brands behave no matter where they show up. So it's really abstracting brand and codifying brand into even more componentized micro component microservices pieces that can be disseminated and still somehow maintain the integrity of that brand and and its origins. I mean, I hear that and I just think about the volume of assets. Well, I think what's interesting, but you know, you tie that with what you just said about artists using generative AI and a lot of those assets can be can be generated, you know, and there's going to be, I think, obviously a core set of things that need to be quote unquote designed, but they need to be so specialized that they can be put together in in different ways. It's like it's really like design systems today, but you know, you know, much more robust and indistributed kind of space. Do you have you thought at all about a timeline? Like when do we stop talking about AI and it's just sort of part of the system? I know it's funny. We had a we had a breakfast with some some other agency leaders recently and the comment was, you know, can we can be pick a different topic than AI? Fair enough and and I feel similarly no doubt, but it's just it's just everything. I don't know. I don't know when we stop talking about it as AI, so you know, and I can't think of an analogy, but it's just it's just it's infused in absolutely everything. I also think about the like changes, the sort of innovative changes that have gotten us to this place, right? Like information's more readily available than it was when the computer came on the scene, right? So we're, you know, spending more time reading about these things have access to more information. We saw what happens when the internet sort of cleared out whole whole industries or changed whole industries, so I think more people are paying attention to it. You know, that heightened fear too, I think. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that I think I mean, I think fear is valid. I don't know that it is particularly helpful, but I think it's super valid. And while I have a good deal of excitement for what is possible and and I think, you know, even just the being being part of a different design landscape, such as generative UI, is really exciting and thinking about what those problems are. There is obviously the fear, not only, well, multiple fears, fear of, you know, what does it mean for the workforce and people's jobs, but also that it is and can be used in in bad ways. You know, I think I read an article recently that just underlined the point, which we all know and it's something that we think about, but, you know, bad design isn't by accident. You know, it's it's often a very conscious choice and some of the sort of dark UX patterns and things like that that, you know, lock people in that cheap people that just have nefarious ends are going to be a lot easier to implement. And so that there is, you know, that the checks and balances are something that we need to be thinking about for sure. No, I mean, it makes me think about the sort of innovation of it all always, just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should. And I think when things people are innovating so so quickly and it's so exciting and fascinating, you sort of forget that piece, right? The sort of joy of the discovery takes over. No, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, it is it is an area that we think about as an organization and we are very first website had as a sort of tagline we believe websites can change people's lives is that crazy. And I know that that is an idea that is long been lamponed, including television show Silicon Valley, but the sentiment is real and and we do want all of our some total of our actions to contribute to a more open resilient and optimistic world. And so we're conscious and we're eyes wide open and we make decisions with that in mind, but we do we are moving as a as a people very quickly in a direction that we don't fully understand at all. Well, let's talk about your people. Let's talk about your people. I saw somewhere that area 17 took everybody on a retreat for the first time ever, like a global team retreat. That must have been pretty fun. It was amazing. It was so great. Yeah, so we it was the first time ever getting both studios together as you said, bringing the team together and talking about it for ages or we're you know 22 or 23 years old as an organization. And it was just incredible. We were in albons, which is in the Gerona area of Spain just outside of Barcelona. And you know, I think there was just so much good energy. There were people that were meeting each other that hadn't met that had been working together for 10 years and hadn't met in person. I mean, it was rare, but you know, it was it was just really quite wonderful. Why decide to do it now? Like what finally sort of fell into place or what was the sort of driving force behind finally doing it? You know, we we planned on doing a 20 year anniversary. We wanted to do, you know, something really significant. And it just didn't come to fruition. It wasn't something we could do at the time. For our 15 year anniversary, I believe, or actually, well, it was 2018. So I think it ended up being our 17 year anniversary. But for one of our anniversaries, I think it was the 15. We did parties in both in both studios. So we had, you know, we brought clients and we brought in friends and it was really, really, really fun. It was actually the I went directly to the to the design thinkers in Toronto right after that. And so we wanted to do the same kind of thing again, but as we were planning it out, missed the big anniversary. And we thought, well, instead of parties, can we just put that money into a big trip and get everyone together and do the thing that we've been talking about for so, so many years? And it came together. So it was, you know, I think it was also in some ways a response to this remote work, distributed world that we're all experiencing, you know, and the huge transformation that, you know, locked down and COVID brought to the world. So that was a component of it as well. Yeah, yeah, I think that sort of distributed world, that remoteness is amazing in some ways and you lose some stuff in other ways. Yeah, I mean, you know, and we've, we made commitments to ourselves and our team that we believe in collaboration. We believe in being face to face. And there was, we're part of soda. It's called the Society of Digital Agency, which is quite a big group of firms. And when I would say, I don't want to say the majority, but I would say when a good portion of those groups were going fully remote, you know, taking advantage rightly so of, you know, if not having a central place, we made the opposite decision. And we said, okay, we're going to invest in our club houses. We're going to create these as places to bring people together. And so we opened new studios in Paris in New York the year and a half two years ago. And they're real places of collaboration. And I think beautiful and lovely places to go into. But it was, it was a big investment and a big choice. And it's because we just think that while we value and, and think that the, you know, remote work and, and distributed workforce, it has a lot of pluses, the more we can bring people together, the better. So if any makes me think about sort of building spaces that people actually want to go to, that choose to go to, which all sort of ties back to this same idea of, of choice and customization. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. And we haven't had strict policies about back to work or that kind of thing. We're really just trying to create the environment and the programs that help bring people together. So obviously, that's a big program, bringing everybody together in Spain for a few days. You know, but we also have monthly programs. We have a, a team week in each studio every month where we try to bring as many people in from outside. So we have, you know, distributed workforce as well, or folks who are distributed, I should say, and, you know, try to get them in as often as possible for, for our monthly team weeks. And it's great. It's just been really great, really. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's amazing to be able to do that because ultimately we are sort of designing with people, for people, right? Exactly. Yes. I want to ask you about some of the long-term partnerships that Arias 17 has. You know, I know you've sort of been doing this series on social for the last little bit about some of these enduring partnerships. And some of them are long. Like, there are folks that you've been working with for a really, really long time. They get a museum that aren't into the studio of Chicago, then your times. Like, those are, those are long, long-term collaborations. And that's the dream, right? To be able to keep working with the same people. Absolutely. It's the dream. I mean, it, and it's, it's also, it's a dream and it's a strategy. It's the, we hope strategy pays off. That's our dream. But no, really, and I mentioned in passing kind of this, you know, this transformation, is it were to kind of a value model. And it's very difficult to have any sort of lasting value or impact when you're brought in to do an individual project and that project ends. And so you haven't been further enough upstream to help influence what that should look like in the first place. And then you're not around after, of course. And so that's, that's all part of us, you know, helping to educate our partners and, and, and our potential partners about how we can bring value, how to, how to participate further upstream to help formulate what and identify the value that they need to create before going into, you know, more of the kind of project particulars and in shaping the outputs that are going to achieve that value. So there, I think that we're, we're, we have successfully made some of those transitions, but it's also an ongoing, an ongoing transformation, for sure. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to sort of hear that even at the sort of scale of work that you're doing, that that sort of client education and that trying to sort of get in earlier in the process is still something. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, you know, a, a company isn't unlike a person in that you go through these different stages of development and, and your focus is on different things. And we've gone through different, you know, chapters and iterations where, you know, we've been, you know, extremely craft focused and, and we are, you know, as craftspeople, I think, you know, some of the most rigorous and, and, and, um, effective and, and, and, and talented group of people at the craft level. But we went through other, another iteration where we, where we're like, okay, well, we can build something super, super well. But if it's not the right thing, then, you know, then to what end? And, and that sort of that, that phase was really, you know, focusing on our kind of strategic building out that strategy team and, and, and building out our, our kind of strategic offering. And, and I would say that the iteration that we're kind of looking at now is it's building on those two. It's in some ways kind of a maker's consultancy. You know, it's, it's really thinking about, okay, um, how do we do that early stage thinking, but in a way that is, um, not just a, you know, 100 page or 200 page deck, but rather getting quickly to identifying that value and the hypothesis of what it is going to take to create that value. And then, you know, getting into the making, I think there's, you know, one of my colleagues had recently, and it's just been, just just been playing in my head since, is that there's just something really, really special that comes through making. And it sort of creates its own energy. It creates its own, it creates its own thinking, you know, design thinking has gotten a bit of a bad rap, but design thinking in its best iteration is actually design making. It's forming the hypothesis as fast as possible based on as much information as you can. It's making things that respond to that hypothesis and calibrating them and calibrating the hypothesis along the way and then making a decision and going forward and then doing it all again. Um, and so I think that, you know, we're, we're really focused on that, that creation of value and how we can help identify it early enough and test it early enough that we're able to deliver on it without wasting any effort and, and be able to measure it at the end. Someone else I spoke to a past as I think her speaker, the wonderful Catalina Estrada. She described this process that I've sort of never given words to. She described it as active patients. So the actual act of making is this thing where we just like we're doing and we're doing and we're doing and we're doing until the thing happens. And it sounds much like that, right? Like that is the sort of the, I love that. That's really cool. Yeah. The sort of magic of it, right? Is that you sort of are doing it and doing it and doing it until the pieces fall into place. And there is something really intangible about the design process. There's something that is really hard to explain to someone who's never made anything before, right? Like it, I'm not, I'm not actually sure if this thing I'm presenting to you right now is going to work until I get in there and do it. Exactly. And I think, you know, and I think, yeah, that's, I think that's exactly right. I also think that there is a this sort of misnomer that there are the consultants and then there's the makers. You know, it's like, okay, the consultants come in and they come up with what is the thing? The thinkers versus the sort of service people. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that what we need to do is pull that that sum of that that beauty, that magic that comes from making into the consulting and be really clear that these are hypotheses. You know, we're going to we're going to play with some hypotheses before we go and create the output that then is going to be, you know, go through for the iterations, but it's going to cost a lot more money to make. And there's still going to be making. There's still going to be that magic in that process too, but it's going to be it's going to have narrower parameters. So it's all it's this narrowing of parameters. But if we narrow the parameters too soon, we don't have that sort of magic of consultancy making. Yeah. Yeah. If you lock into early, you sort of block out, you close the door on all of the magic that can happen during the process. Yeah, I've, you know, been talking to a lot of people about the mess, the messy part, right? Like the part where it doesn't actually make sense and you don't know which way is out anymore. Exactly. Yeah. It's all part of it. We're we're almost at a time, but I have one really important question for you before we go. Who's watering the plants this week if you're in North Bay? Yes, no, that's absolutely true. My great colleague, Mary, is watering the plants and we have we've certainly grown our, we've grown our number of plants quite a lot over the years. So it's a it's a big job. How many do you think you have at the studio? I don't know. I actually asked Mary that the other day and we hadn't counted, but there's a, you know, there's at least a hundred to 200 plants in there. So well, 200 is your number to beat. That's how many plants our JD's executive director, Hilary Ashworth has. She's 200 plants at home. That's zero. Okay. All right. I didn't know that about Hilary. All right. I'll have to ask her. That's amazing. I'm going to go and do a cast right away. So you can compete. Do you have a favorite plant in the office? I don't know the, well, we have a huge beautiful bird of paradise. And I love those plants a lot, but my favorite are tropical and arid plants. So those are the ones I gravitate to. We did this. We did this really wonderful thing in, I think, during, during the lockdown on social where we had, it's called New Growth Mondays. And we would have one of our, one of any member of our team would contribute pictures of their plant in growth and then share a comment or an idea or a mantra. And it was really nice. That does so nice. Well, I'm sure Mary is doing a great job looking after the plants in Europe. Since, um, thank you so much for doing this. It was so nice to see you to chat with you. And, um, we'll see you in October at Design Thinkers. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you. Take care. Design thinkers is Canada's largest annual graphic design conference. Find out more by visiting designthinkers.com. Design thinkers is produced by the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, also known as the RGD. The RGD is Canada's largest professional association for graphic designers. Our vision is for a graphic design profession that is broadly valued for its contribution to life, commerce and society. To find out more, visit rgd.ca.