Service Design meets Speculative Design, with Tobias Revell from the Arup Futures Team

[Music] Welcome to the launch episode of STN UK's service design yet. Over the past years, STN UK has brought our community together through events and webinars and following lockdown, we decided that a podcast could be a good way to reach more designers and create a space to share ideas, to share career stories and to share service design war stories. In each episode, we'll talk to a designer at a different stage of their career to hear about their journey, their favourite projects and to learn what service design means to them. As designers, we love prototyping and we're thinking about this pilot series as our prototype. We'd like to get your help validating and refining our pilot prototype to make sure that listening is valuable and enjoyable. So please let us know if we're focusing on the right topics, asking the right questions and interviewing the right people. So please look into the show notes to find out how to contact us and to give us your feedback and that'll help us to refine our prototype, or go back to the drawing board to find a new, better way to engage with our community. Today, I'm pleased to be joined by Tobias Revel, whose design features leader, Aaron. How are you doing Tobias? I'm doing very well. Thank you. How are you all doing? I think we're getting into the swing of podcasting now. I think we're now saying a lot less. So just to kick us off, we always ask the most difficult question for any designer, and that's how do you describe what you do all day to your family? So I've sort of given up on this point of trying to slice up the discipline and I just say I do design work, and usually I say I use design in strategic ways, so it's less about designing material outputs like objects or posters or services or whatever, but more about designing ways of thinking through stuff, which immediately doesn't answer the question because it just makes it more vague. But actually, a lot of what I do day to day is just managing people and helping support the foresight team at Arab and helping to work with our clients, whether they're internal or external, and doing the things that people in most other jobs probably do day to day, and trying to do more design work than I used to do at the moment because that's sort of what I love doing. But yeah. And you've said that you work with the foresight team at Arab. Can you tell us a little bit about the team and how it came into existence? Sure. So the team's about 30 people, and the main team is based in London, but we have outposts all over the world in a different region. So Arabs are built environment firms, so we do everything from sort of energy and transportation infrastructure to buildings, rail projects, all sorts of stuff. It's about 17,000 people around the world, and the team is, like I said, about 30 people based in London. About a third of those folks are coming from some sort of design background, either design or architecture or something similar, and the rest are from everything from climate policy, bioscience, and energy, and our sisal sorts of things like that. And we do work mostly for Arab, where we look at future opportunities and threats to the business and the various projects that we're doing. Sometimes that's quite general and strategic, so it's sort of looking at what the next decades mean for Arabs business and operations and for the things that wants to achieve. And sometimes it's for specific projects, so if there's a specific client project where it requires some foresight input because it's happening over a long time, then we would do that. You know, foresight at Arab has a long history. I actually worked there 10 years ago as a graduate, as a freelancer, and have recently returned in a more senior role. But there's this connection with two main things I think that sets Arab apart for its foresight unit. The first is that Arab is member-owned, so we're owned by ourselves, which means that there's a bit more of an investment in the values that we espouse and making sure those things are real, and it's a real driver for people to join and work at the company, and so foresight's role in doing that is really important, making sure we meet our commitments to climate change and social value. And the second thing is just working in the built environment means that projects take place over a long, long time. They may take a decade to actually go from design to implementation, and then may last for 50 to 100 years, and so foresight's a really important part of ensuring the quality and excellence and rigor of those projects, which is something that clients really appreciate. So I think you're at the two things that I'd like to pick up on in your story there. First of all, you talked about working with clients, and clients appreciating their foresight work. Are you seeing more clients expecting to see foresight work reflected in the proposals that you produce? It's a really interesting question. It's hard to say because we have a lot of clients, first of all, at the top-level Arabs. It's not a sort of start-up. We're not sure of attracting clients, but I think there are two factors at play. The first is in hard economic times, such as the ones we're in. Business tends to turn away from things like research and foresight as a rule, because there's a greater emphasis on more tangible deliverables, more stuff that you can do day-to-day, and things like that, Arab won't do that necessarily, but certainly maybe our clients might be thinking less about the long-term thinking for their projects and more about immediate deliverables. But the second thing is actually we'd expect because of the recent growth in popularity and value of ESGs, so looking at environmental and sustainability and social goals for companies. There's an increased emphasis on using tools like foresight to ensure that your meeting's certain standards and certain qualities around sustainable development, around climate change, around social equity, and things like that where foresight has a really important role, particularly over the lifespan of a project like a building or a piece of infrastructure. More generally, I'd say, you know, just over the last 10, 15 years of practice, I think there's massively increased futures literacy in industry of all sorts, whether it's in build environment, tech, design, whatever. And I think there's a huge increase in interest in how you can use futures tools, whether foresight or others, in increasing the rigor and quality and excellence, and even in hopefully more cases, the criticality of project. Yeah, Dan, I think you're right. I think even just about three years ago, I was in a design meet-up when we were talking about the design community as sort of a cross-disciplinary community. Everyone was listening to different types of design, and the one that was missed out was speculative design, and maybe someone typed up at the back of the way to dance and sort of done rabie units back in their masters, but it certainly wasn't front and centre. You know, if you look at where we are today, there's a great article in the FT, looking at Ikea, and they were talking about moving away from the usual quantitative forecasting into exploratory scenarios, and using futures type frameworks to try and help them to have less surprises. So actually, you know, as you move into that world where maybe you're thinking about, you know, we have less appetite to do stuff that's long-term. Actually, the tools help us to think about what could be midterm because things are moving so quickly. Yeah, Ikea are a really great example, and I've done work with them before. I think in their case, because they have such a, I wouldn't say monopoly, but because they have such a powerful presence in the industry, they have this privilege of being able to really shake the conversation, and thus the futures work is really important for them, which is fantastic. And going back to your point about curriculums before I was working at Arup, I was an academic and managing various programs in higher education, and you know, the increase from speculative design, for instance, or even, you know, futures thinking and design being something that maybe saw in one or two courses in London to now being, I'd say, in every postgraduate design course. It's been very remarkable, right? It's part of the mainstream of design now, which is, you know, good and bad, I think, has some amazing, amazing potential to help students think about the future and think about the long-term impact of stuff and reflect on their own practice, but downside can be that it becomes a bit toothless, and it becomes a bit performative, just thinking about the future, and you're not really properly embracing and thinking about it, but you're just sort of going, oh, yeah, the futures there, and I've done something about, you know, a magic technology that does X, Y, or Z. I have ticked a box. Most design courses will be focusing on the desirable, viable, feasible. To think that, actually, we could even have viable in the mix without thinking about future scenarios. Well, yeah, we're not talking about viability at the point that I've just now, we're talking about the lifespan of a product in your area, something that built environment, then in our areas, the services, which do persist if we tend to think of them as things that are rather static, whatever you get into an organization, and maybe you contact them by phone, you get into an IVR, you can see where a service hasn't been touched in decades because it doesn't really reflect, maybe the brand, or hasn't been fine-changed to reflect things that have changed in the interim, or the worst-case scenario, they Frankenstein it together. The other thing I wanted to pick up out on was you were describing the makeup of your team. It was really interesting because you talked about a mix of those from a core design background and those who are not. How does this blend shape the way that you work together? Yeah, it's intentionally constructed that way. It's an intentional decision not to just have a bunch of people with like futures or foresight or anticipatory studies degrees altogether because you then look with sort of group think of one sort or another. And because Arab is so multidisciplinary, you know, built environment is arguably everything from the device in your pocket up to the city you move through. So it's this huge range of different practices and time scales and materials and things like that. So it means that we're really responsive to expertise. So there's an intentional decision to have that that multidisciplinary approach into constantly when we recruit, think about how we supplement our existing skills with either expertise from new domains or new methods and tools, new approaches to do research and things like that. We're a design led team which is fantastic and it's one of of things that attracted me to going back to Arup to work. Which means that unlike, for instance, you might find a foresight team that's maybe more data-driven, like there are companies where they rely a lot on using so-called AI systems or lots of quantitative analysis and quantitative data to do scenarios and things like that. We really focus on story and narrative and ideas like that that are drawn more from design. So that starts to sort of structure, I suppose, the methodological attitude of how we go about doing projects. So we then quite a straightforward client project where we're inquiring about the future of X technology and how it would impact their business or their services. We always approach it in this quite user. Well, I'm going to say user-centered way, although we're also trying to critique the idea of being user-centered and think more about how we become planet-centered. But certainly not just looking at the data and the facts, but looking into how do people feel about what's going on? How do they respond to what's going on? How do people's irrational or so-called irrational decisions affect the way they might interact with this future technology or speculative service that this client's may be thinking inventing? And the other thing that design is really enabled us to do and having a design on every project and being design led is this idea of really quickly being able to synthesize the multidisciplinary approach. So obviously, your audience probably know this in design as no, this. Design is really good at getting people from different domains to talk to each other and figuring out what the locking intersection is where you get, for instance, some climate scientists and some infrastructure engineers to talk to each other. Because they have such different languages, such different tools, such different ontologies and world views, and where our designers come in and why we put a design on every project is if we're trying to get clients to talk with our experts. The designers are in the middle there figuring out what the bridge is and what the connection is. And they do that practically through workshops and mirror boards and whatnot, but also just through being able to cognitively distill the nature of the conversation and get to the crux of what people are trying to achieve in a project. I think designers are great at building bridges, but also walls. And then in other situations where people have tried to bring together these multidisciplinary teams, you've had almost like a separation of the tribes. So in one example, I know in an open plan office, people came back one morning to find that actually, the bookcases have been put down the middle and a wall of green plants have been built to sort of demarcate the different areas in the office because they're like, oh, water, maybe the multidisciplinary have not really been-- I mean, that sucks. That's terrible. I mean, the simple thing is we all hang out together. So I'm not just hanging out with the design team. I'm hanging out with the climate folks and the transport policy folks and talking to them. Everyone's just socializing together with a physically or online. So I don't have that sense of demarcated space so much. I use the word socializing as opposed to working. Is there a difference? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, people work together, but I mentioned earlier that Arup is a member-owned company. And I would say that, you know, and this isn't just sort of fluffing it up, that everyone in the team is there because they are driven by the thing they believe. And in almost everyone's case, that's sustainable development and climate change. So they're all sort of like personally invested in the work we're doing. And we make pretty active decisions about the work we're going to do based on the things we personally want to see in the world and also how we instantiate that as a team and make the best use of each other and the structures of Arup to make that happen. And there's very much a sense of everyone pulling in one direction, which means it's really easy to build social bonds. It's not just working relationships. It's also hanging out and things like that. As a simple example, I've currently at home nursing an injury. And the design team just paid a surprise visit the other week and came and hung out and did a bit of work from hearing we had a tea party. There we go. I think in some organizations, the psychological safety button would have been pressed at that point when people were coming around saying, yeah, we've noticed this item in your queue hasn't been progressed. Could you? Oh, no. I've been really fortunate never to work in that kind of environment, certainly in high pressure environment. But they're always with a lot of trust. And certainly that's something when I now manage folks and teams and stuff and have done for the last few years. I've always found to be super effective, which is just being really clear about this is what you need to do and buy when, or this is your responsibility and what the deadlines are within that frame. However, you choose to go about it. And when you choose to work and how you break that down and how you delegated, that's totally up to you as long as we get that thing done by that time. And if you can't do it, that's fine. Just let me know. Hi, good people. And let them get on with that. Yeah, exactly. I give everyone a Wi-Fi connection. I think those are the two things. The Wi-Fi connection. That's the bottom of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs now, so that's kind of a given. So you've talked about-- and this is one of the things I'm always interested in because more and more design studios are working as part of the wider, multidisciplinary teams, not just on project work, but in the overarching way that they're pulled together. And you've talked about your multidisciplinary team being bonded by two things. You've got the common purpose. So everyone's there because they're focused on climate change and environmental impact. But you also talked about their overarching framework of narrative and being data driven, but primarily having that overarching of authority. How do you establish that within your team, where the people who come into your team, and you? Wow, that's tough. I mean, I'm going to go back a bit and sort of circle around the question and hopefully it answers it. When I started, my role was a new one. Design Futures lead a foresight. And this is because there's a growing understanding of the intellectual value of design, to influence and to change organizations and to transform, as I'm sure everyone listening would understand. But you've got to remember for a lot of people that's a relatively novel concept. And the first thing I did was I sort of put together a slide deck of some great examples of projects, some of my own, and mostly other people's that I thought were really great. And sort of take them to people and be like, OK, this is this great speculative design or transformative design project. And they set out to achieve this. And this is how they did it. And you know, this is what happened. And that was effective to a degree. But actually the most effective thing was just starting to do work. And actually, particularly with senior folks who maybe didn't fully understand the value of what we were trying to do and how design and storytelling and narrative and speculation and things like that would come together to meet the strategic objectives that we have, just doing a project. I mean, like, look, just trust me. We're going to do this project. We'll deliver it. We'll have a great impact. And then we can debrief and we can talk about how it worked and do the next thing in that. I find the most effective tool. I know it's probably something that every design has heard at some point in their education is showing me, don't tell me, right? It's just do the project. And we always take approach to open to the meeting. - Yeah. - So let's just crack on it is always, you know, we know that that's a great way to convert people from skepticism to being supporters. But I think one of the main challenges is actually just getting that license. So we know it's going to work. But if we've got people who are detractors or skeptics, try to get them into a position where they will say, yeah, Tobias, off you go. What were the different tactics that you used to bring that situation about? - The most useful one is finding champions and supporters at a senior level, right? The biggest thing for me wasn't bringing the team along. Like that's totally fine. Now most of the folks in the team are younger than me have been through education relatively recently and are pretty cogent on the state of the field and what the value of design is, even the non-design is. So that's fine. But it's more like convincing senior stakeholders in Arab. And so the first thing I did was sort of spend a little while identifying folks who were friendly and would champion the work we wanted to do all over the business. So Arabs quite interesting in that although there is a hierarchy, it doesn't run very hierarchically day to day. It's quite a sort of open and collaborative environment and that's good and bad in that the good thing is you have quite a lot of permission and privilege to do what you want as long as it's generally meeting the objectives of the business again. But the bad thing is it's really hard to identify where the lever is or the pain point is to actually make something happen because maybe you need to talk to sort of 20 people in order to do a project. - You have a cycle of consensus. - Yeah, it's like a massive Venn diagram where people have all these different domains and specialisms that slightly overlap and some folks are quite protective of them and some folks are quite permissive. And you've got to sort of just build a mental map of that space over years I think it's I still don't have it. And then know where to go and how to target stuff. But setting up these champions in that network and talking to them regularly and getting their input and feedback and genuinely appreciating it not just doing it to buy permission but actually being like what do you think is going to be the most effective way of making an impact with the people we want to make an impact with. What would you like to see out of these projects? You know, that is enormously helpful and including them in the process of setting up this new program of work around design futures and accelerating the work of the team in what we do in design and storytelling and things like that. That's been enormously useful I think as a way of buying some privilege, buying some legitimacy. - Grant, it sounds like there was a good amount of leg work but you also identified those friendly stakeholders and had a way to articulate that what's in it for me for them to show how actually it was going to add value to them. - Yeah, but also I think importantly, those senior stakeholders want this work to happen, right? And they want to be part of it. There's also an element of giving them voice and authorship in it at the same time, right? Whether that's as a formal in a formal position in some sort of steering group or advisory role for a project which we usually do for large projects we have like a steering group who are external advisors or it's just someone who you sort of go to and say look you're someone I trust in confidence and I love your input on stuff. - Both great ways to get advocacy behind you and advocacy gives you momentum. - Awesome. So I think we've talked a little bit about your current role and I just want to take us back a little bit to focus on how you got where you are today. You can tell us a little bit about your formative years or a little bit about your education and how you ended up as a futurist. I mean, I just call myself a designer these days. I went through a while of changing titles. I think when you're sort of relatively fresh, you're trying to carve out a niche for yourself and eventually you develop the confidence just to be like, "Look, I'm just a designer. "Everything I do is design." Whether it's doing Excel spreadsheets or mirrorboards or making things in code. I have a relatively boring education history, which is I just studied interaction design in London, both at undergrads and post-grad. And I did interaction design at LCC and then went to the Royal College of Art and did design interactions, which at the time was Tony Dunham, Fiona Rabie's course. And for many, the origin point of sort of speculative and critical design, importantly, the critical design is the bit that seems to have been forgotten or dropped most of them nowadays. And yeah, graduate there, I think. It took some time out in between to just do my own art practice and stuff between my underground and post-grad. And I sort of give this advice all the time as I just tried everything. Like, everything that came my way. And I have to, again, point out the incredible privilege of being at the RCA, and then I got a lot of stuff come my way because you're obviously in a sort of, at the time, at least, a sort of lofty and well-respected institution where lots of people are paying attention to the graduates. I started working with Superflux who are a London-based design studio who do lots of sort of future-oriented work. I started working at Arup as a freelancer. So the Joseph, who's still the director of Forsyte and had just started at time, came to my grad show and we just talked about my work. And he said, you know, you should come by the office and talk to our team, which at the time was like four people. And yes, started freelancing there. I was doing my own just general freelance work as well with various folks I'd met through either peers at university or at the time on Twitter because Twitter was really super active. Me and was really formative and important in building my network as I was reading stuff and thinking about stuff. And I've always run a blog, I've run a blog for probably since I was about 16, 17. And I was always sharing that and talking with people about ideas and stuff. And so Twitter was really important and met lots of freelance contacts through there. kept doing artistic work, which by which I mean anything that I made that went into a gallery. And then also started teaching at the time on my old undergrad course, just part time. And then gradually I got more and more interested in the teaching and the academic side of stuff just because I really enjoyed it generally. There wasn't any particular reason I really enjoyed it. And as any student who's recently graduated, I really looked up to the folks who taught me and thought that it was a really great thing to do. And it still is. Did that for a number of years became increasingly committed to and senior in higher education in academia till to a point where when I left two years ago, I was a program director so that's sort of running a suite of courses of around, I think it was about 600 students in total and about 30, 40 members of staff. But also along the way I set up my own studio. So I built a studio very, very quickly called Strange Telemetry, which was with Georgina Voss and Justin Picard and Maisie Bowes. So Georgina and Justin were both social scientists and Maisie a designer. That was another interdisciplinary studio and we did sort of speculative design for policy making. I would best describe it as we had the paradoxical problem of writing a very rigorous five-year plan of what we wanted to achieve and then achieving it in about 18 months and not really knowing what to do next. So we ended up, ended up, sort of, disbanding off quietly after a few years 'cause we'd all sort of our careers in advance in our own ways and we weren't really working together that much anymore. And then yeah, in November 21, I kept talking with everyone. I think it's undeniable the network is super important and I'd been keeping talking to Joseph over the years and he basically said, you know, look, we've gone through this transformation and would you be interested in coming back? And that's now on there. - Absolutely. And we'd just like to talk about the fact this was done over a 10-year period or 10-plus-year period. - Yeah. - I wouldn't. - Lots of other things along the way that I've glossed over, yeah. It's about 10-year. - Yeah. I think people are just listening to that and thinking, when does he sleep? (laughs) As you said, networking is something that seems to have positioned you well from the outset. We've come across each other in different communities. It's like, ah, ah. - I always come back to this. My dad told me, I mean, really valuable, you know, who's not a designer, who's a salesperson IBM, but he told me something that's always stuck with me, which is the first time someone sees your name, they'll forget it most likely. The second time they see it, they'll go, where have I seen that name before? And so there is a thing about, and I hate it, I hate networking. I don't think anybody genuinely likes networking 'cause I'd rather just sit in and play on the PlayStation all day. (laughs) But there is a genuine value to it and just like following up with people and now is someone who gets a lot of messages from folks or emails from folks being like, I'd love to just talk to you about my work. I'm always like, yes, absolutely. Let me find the minutes where I can talk to you because it's really effective, even if it doesn't lead to anything directly. I might in two years be like, ah, this person spoke to me, they were doing this project about that thing. Who was it? Let me dig through my emails and it's so and so, you know, recent grad I spoke to for 30 minutes, you know, a year ago or whatever. - So it's really surprising to me that you say, you don't particularly enjoy networking because you're, I was gonna say omnipresent. Let's say, gregarious. And you're also a really good rack on turf. You've got a great way to tell a story. It seems like it comes naturally to you. And I think a lot of people who are probably coming out of the university, see this idea of net working as a skill, they must learn on some online course and force themselves to do. How did you go from, it's something you don't particularly relish doing to being something you're really good at. Are there any tips that you could offer? - I mean, it sounds really brutal, but you do have to just see it as part of the job, right? And it is part of something you have to do. You know, we're not in a world. I don't think in many careers, I'm thinking even across the technical domains in Europe now, where it's just about being really diligent and professional and just doing really excellent work consistently as enough. It's just the way the world operates now is so much based on sort of intercommunication and intertextuality and sharing and being present and sort of being someone who's in the conversation, you know, going to the event. - Engaged. - Yeah, engaged, right? And demonstrating that level of engagement. And you know, now when I look at recruiting, for instance, grad roles into our team, you know, I'm not just looking at are they a really excellent designer or really excellent analyst, and also like, are they engaged in the discourse? Are they reading? Are they worldly? Are they sort of interested in the thing they're doing in a way that's demonstrable through there, either through their portfolio or personal statement? You know, they have ambitions, they have thoughts about the field. - Or even social media? - Yeah, I mean, social, I like I said earlier, Twitter was really, really cornerstone for me starting out. I don't think I'd be where I was if I hadn't been quite active on just talking to people on Twitter and building us what we call a parasociality. So not really, really knowing someone, but knowing about the Twitter that you could confidently say you know what they're about, tips for networking. The other thing is be interested in other people. I think that's, you know, one of the things that I dislike about networking and when I'm going to an event and people are talking to me and they're just talking about their thing, nonstop, and they never ask like, how are you? How's your, you know, just the pleasantry that being a person, like people that everyone's working super hard, everyone's worried and anxious. And actually I've also find being so just disarmingly honest and direct with people and being like, look, I'm really struggling and you know, I'm working too hard, I barely sleep, my doors are just, you know, I've got a broken leg. It's not great, it sucks, but I'm excited by this. It's like quite a good way of just building a relationship with someone. - But there are all the examples you've just given are about you being a human. - Yeah. - Rather than you being a role or a professional. - Yeah, that's paradoxical, isn't it? My first thing was like just as part of the job, my second thing was be human. But there's an interesting thing right about authenticity. We're seeing it a lot, and I may be talking to an audience who are in this mindset, but one of the things we've seen in research, and this is foresight work, is this drive amongst younger generations for like authenticity and value. They're not interested in the sort of corporate narrative or the sort of, you know, PR story. They want to know like the people behind the brand and the reality of what's really going on. You know, if you look at something like Patagonia as an example, or Billy Eilish or anything else of these success stories where something is driven by its authenticity, and I increasingly value that. I think that's really important. You know, you can be both the job and the human that does the job, I think. - The most interesting people are every designer you talk to you always says, "Oh, I'm really curious." You know, you think, well, actually you've not asked me any questions that show you've done any research about what I'm interested in. - That's really important that we meet. Is that why? Well, I've looked at your job title, and I believe that you're okay, but you've got no idea about my areas of special interest, what that I've done in the past, whereas the approaches you get that say, "Hey, I've just seen there, you've published there, "so this is one of your projects." And I think you're wrong here. I love that. - Yeah, I love that. Or have you thought about this, right? Or adding to it? You know, I try to be honest about my thoughts about stuff while trying to not be offensive, but sometimes. - Sometimes people read things the wrong way, right? And especially on things like Twitter and blogs and stuff where there's no context necessarily. And I definitely got into a bad time in sort of 2013-14 when there was a critical backlash against speculative design in the RCA sense and I was sort of caught up in the storm of that. And I sort of retreated quite a bit from the networking and social world because I just thought that I was upsetting to many people. And I don't think I was really retrospectively, but when someone's sort of berating you quite heavily in blogs and on Twitter and stuff, you're like, oh no, I really, really hurt these people and that's really bad. Retrospectively, I'm like, well, that's just part of it. That's just part of the discourse. And actually, I think there was something sort of unprofessional there on the other side. But I think being honest about your opinions and also being accepting of other people's opinions of you is really important, as you said. So if someone's like, don't think you understood this correctly or like, can I just tell you a bit more about this? And I'm like, yeah. - Absolutely, let's talk it over. - It's the difference between a debate and a crusade. - Exactly. At this part of the podcast, we always ask our guests about their favorite projects. So Tobias, if you reflect on your own very career, which projects do you always talk to your friends and colleagues in the public? - All right, I'm gonna answer this with two. And the way I'm gonna approach this, 'cause it's really difficult, 'cause I can't think of a favorite project. I'm gonna think about one that I come back to a lot and talk about a lot, not necessarily 'cause it's a favorite, but because it was an interesting process. And then the second one I'm gonna talk about is the current favorite one I'm doing at Arab, which I can talk about, I think, relatively freely, 'cause it's an internal project. So Charismatic Mega Pigment was a collaborative, I'd say, artistic project that I did with my regular collaborator, Wesley Goetley, and a painter called Charlie Peters, who's a very good friend. And it's basically a project looking at artificial intelligence at the time, I think this is 2018, I'm gonna say. So sort of early, deep learning availability, we built basically a robot that could move across one of Charlie's amazing paintings. And as it was doing so, it would analyze what it was seeing underneath. So you've gotta imagine this is like an iPad scrolling across a painting, like movie across the front of the painting. Behind this iPad is a camera, and the camera's picking up this closer sections of the painting as it moves across it. And what it's trying to do is match the image of what it sees in the painting, which is quite an abstract painting with lots of gradients and lines and shapes in it. It's trying to match what it's seeing of a section of the painting with an image that we scraped from greenwashing websites on corporation websites. (laughing) So the painting is overwhelmingly green. It's called Charismatic Mega Pigment because the thing we were interested in exploring with three of us is this role of green and it's semiotic and technical role. So it has some really interesting properties. You know, it's used a lot in computer graphics, which at the time I was researching heavily because it's not a color that occurs naturally in the human body, which is why it's a very good way of green screening humans away other than in the eyes. It's in a painting context with Charlie who was thinking about it's a very noxious substance traditionally. And obviously socially and culturally it has this meaning of sort of planetary health and ecological health and things like that. So we basically scraped, I think it was 125,000 images from various corporate websites sort of environmental or sustainability statements where you've got these flowing green fields or this beautiful forest or whatever it is and trained a machine learning system to identify the properties and forms of those images. So as this robot scrolls across the painting live, it's sort of able to find a nearest neighbor. And there's some interesting critical stuff in there about where meaning is made and that's a discussion that's happening now a lot more with the current hype around large language models like chat GPT and this idea that somehow there's meaning in them when there is and it's just an algorithm trained on big data. But humans can't avoid projecting meaning into systems. We just can't avoid it. So one of the great things was people looking at that project and being like, well, what does it mean? And I was being like, it means nothing. It's just a computer. But what was really interesting for me as well was the collaboration and the nature of the collaboration. So Wesley is a sort of artist coming from the sound arts but his PhD work is around data. I'm coming from design and so very much think about audiences and form and things like that. And Charlie's coming from painting and the fine arts and so although we're incredibly good friends, we had some really interesting, fractious discussions as we were doing the project, which were really, really revelatory for me as I'm doing my own PhD work related to AI. And so that was a really favorite project 'cause some of those conversations I found to be really transformative and really useful. And was there a path that flowed the other way so you actually looked at the abstract picture and then we've together a tapestry of those next neighbor images and then sew those together. So you can say actually what we've done is we've got the abstract, we've got the concrete and the green washing size here. And this is, it's almost like a quilt of lies. - I mean, we could. We didn't, I don't know if it would have been easy at the time. The technology at the time was very janky and required a huge amount of computation in a way that nowadays I think folks who are engaging with so-called AI systems maybe don't appreciate how even in 2018 it was really, really hard to do. Admittedly, we're not computer scientists, none of us, I worked in technology related design for years. I've got some rudimentary understanding of code but it was just very difficult even to get that working properly in a way that nowadays there's probably a web interface that can do it for you in five seconds. - I was going to say we're going to mid journey, we'll type in Jeremy Dellekwell's green washing images from websites and they'll be done in. - Exactly, exactly. - And even then you could probably just fork one of those systems and make your own API and run it, no problem. It's a different world now. That's moved on quite a bit. - In technology, wonderful. You said you have two examples of what we'll say we'll give you, this is almost like desert island discs. - That's right, that's right. - So what was the second project you would like to take away to your pub island? (laughing) - A little bit. - A little bit of the world. - The second project is a project I'm leading currently with our foresight, which is looking at the next 30 years of the business. So our app has a sort of sustainable development strategy, which has certain targets in it that take us maybe into 2030, 2035. And like a lot of strategies, the idea is then we look at what do we do in the next one to three to five years in order to help us get to that point. But we're starting to move beyond the last set of strategies and into the next one. And so I'm working on that. And the way that we're doing it is by building this huge graphic visualization basically of like a roadmap of the next 30 years of everything. Everything with a focus on sustainable development, but that includes technological changes, demographic changes, political changes, and climactic changes, and plotting these sort of pathways to the best possible, most likely and worst possible outcomes. And then looking at a mega model. - Well, this is the interesting thing. The reason why it's interesting and it goes back to one of your early questions is we're trying to do this thing of balancing something that's incredibly rigorous and well evidenced and based on the best available data we can find. But at the same time, tells a story, right? So it's not just data nerding out and just loads and loads of data that becomes overwhelming and actually quite paralyzing, I find, for folks when you just present them with a load of data that it's great and it's really informative, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what to do with it. Whereas what we're trying to do here is then, well, how do we take that super rigorous evidence-based data-rich architecture for these pathways for this roadmap and build a story on top of it, like talent narrative? What are the events that might happen in the best possible scenario based on this data? Why might we see, for instance, peak oil or that less cars being sold in one year than the year before for the first time, like peak car or, you know, when does the population, well, when the population has nine billion is probably set in stone? But things like that that's about to bring it to life and say, okay, this is what these worlds start to look like, not just the IPCC projection or the human development index projection or whatever it is, but an actual sense of, okay, around this year would be peak oil, around this year would be peak urbanization, you know, around this year we'd expect extreme weather once a week or something like that. - I think if you look at the data driven approach, you tend not to get those engagements that you do with their sort of a narrative provocation, more people can engage in that. It even fits a note, you're wrong, which is, again, one of my favorite reactions and that because you have to get one, why? What are the things that we've missed? What are the signals that we're not picking up on? Data tensing at people focused on sources and numbers and areas going up and down, whereas you get more of that abstract thought if there's a narrative, because people can focus on different things within that narrative. So you can buy combination of the two is probably the best way for extreme gauge. - Exactly. - Most majority of people. - And the other thing we're trying to do with it is be really ambitious, right? So really wild, we don't want to just keep it to relatively safe and certain things or things that maybe like senior leaders in the business or others would be sort of comfortable with reading about and cognating, but actually stuff that's really weird because we're in this period that some scholars call the great wording right where there's extreme events and unpredictable events increasing all the time that futures cone is widening closer to us. We talk a good game where everyone talks a good game on like embracing uncertainty, but how do you actually make that happen? For instance, like one of the examples that came up in the discussion with the client was there's a good chance we don't have Facebook in 10 years, right? And that my daughter's generation just never really understand what that is in the same way that I don't understand what Betamax is. And how do you explain that to someone? That's quite a cognitive. Even that's relatively simple proposition is quite a cognitive leap. And there are much more wild things that we need to think about. - Not for when we talk to clients, it always comes out to well, we need to make a bet. We've got a finite resource as earlier, we have to at some point need to work out where we place that bet. So we position ourselves best for the possible scenarios that could blossom. - Yeah, and in this case it's not, you mentioned the IKEA thing earlier where they've turned away from budgeting to scenarios. I think we're starting to see a similar thing where it's not necessarily about making a plan and sticking to it but making a plan that's flexible to all these emergent things. While keeping an eye on where we'd like to go, you know, we want to get to the best possible world. We want to do everything we can as an organization to get to 1.5, it's that sort of simple, you know, and get us there or as close to it as possible. But we also have to be open to OK, let's say there's a system shock in the price of sand or something which would deeply affect us as a built environment business. - Absolutely. - How do we navigate that? - Great, isn't it? Ruiz, you have this great 99% invisible story about the sand mafia. - Yeah, wonderful. Fantastic, you've got your own. two projects. So let's move on to our question from the next generation. Hello, we're Deem Synergy from RCA Service Design, where a team of three designers, I'm Zoolie Engley, and we're working on the future of solar energy for low-income communities. A question to you was, what advice do you have for service designers testing speculative solutions for the future of community behaviour? I mean, I can say from my experience, and there are deviating views here, that being really clear with your stakeholders or your clients or your participants, that this is a speculation of why that's an important thing to do or a useful thing to do is really important. It can be quite easy for folks who maybe aren't used to futures thinking in some way or another, to take futures either as a prediction or as a fiction outright and not really engage with it intellectually and to challenge it and critique it, which is the value of speculation. We're not putting a speculation out there in the world to make a prediction. We're putting it out there as an object that people can question and think about relative to themselves. There's a little bit of pre-work to do, which is often skipped over, which is helping people know how to read, talk about and respond to speculations, which often I found in my experience the folks aren't fully prepared for how to do. There's a sort of social history reason for that we can go into and lots of others have talked about about this notion of the foreclosure of the future and that a big emphasis of both state and corporate development is on not giving people the opportunity to question the future vision, but that's another another podcast or another conversation. But yeah, I think equipping people with the tool to read and respond to speculation is a major thing that's often skipped and I think that brings out the most value, gives people the most sense of participation and control of it and also, you know, if you do that right and develop some maybe some interesting tool that allows people to read and respond to a speculation that's maybe something they can take on to other parts of their lives and other domains and when they're sort of giving them a future vision from government or from a tech company or whatever, they can use those same tools or thought ways of thinking to also question those and respond to them adequately. So you've mentioned tools there, is there anything you're thinking of specifically that could be helpful for engaging with low income communities? I mean, the low income communities part is a very particular thing. There's lots of great work, again, I'd say about how the folks who are most vulnerable are most often excluded from conversation about the future and I'm not going to claim to be an expert in that, you know, I'll refer to folks like Cassie Robinson and the Joseph Roundtree Foundation who are doing some great work on more inclusive community futures and Rachel Koldercut and Careful Trouble amongst others who are also doing similar stuff. I mean, a specific tool I've developed with sort of focus groups to help them engage with future speculations actually came from a design crit that myself and a colleague developed, which is you give them this speculation, whatever form that is, whether it's a written piece of text or an image or a video or an object, you know, however it's manifested. And then you give them a set of cards, the group, let's say you've got a group of 10 folks, multiple groups, and you give them a card, a green card, a red card, a blue card, a yellow card, and you know, optionally a purple card. And those cards are to elicit certain responses. So the green card is what are things they like about the speculation, things they think are great, the red card is things they don't like, and they would, they would worry about. The blue card is feelings. How do they feel? Does it make them anxious, excited, hopeful, nervous, you know, optimistic? The yellow card is things they would want someone else to change or to guarantee. So in this case, for instance, I'm thinking of a project we did which was researching government policy. So what sort of policies or responses might people like from government in this scenario, in this speculation, what sort of support would they need? And then the purple card is things they would do differently. So if they were in that speculative scenario, how might they live differently? How might they think about their money differently, their daily life differently, their job, their family differently, things like that? And that becomes a really structured way of eliciting a specific set of qualitative responses. Brilliant. So not only have you given us a great tool to steal, you also provided two other people that sound like fantastic guests. So thank you for that. So we're getting into the Wind Up stage of the SDN Yap podcast. And I think from my final question, I'm going to go a little bit left field. Tobias, is there a question you'd like me to have asked that I haven't? I think, you know, there's a question I get asked a lot, which is about the sort of futures of design and the role of design, you know, not a specific one, but that notion of what's the future of design. And I think, you know, this is always a developing program of thought for me, like, you know, part of my role at Arab is also more broadly engaged with sort of the culture of designer. Arab is a design led firm and a design firm and and have designers all over the place. And I have this sort of thought experiment that I keep using with people, which is that five, 10 years ago, people were talking about the digital as like a definitive object, you know, the did, like the proper noun, the digital. And I think, you know, going back again to some of the stuff I'll sing about younger folks. I think that baffles people like me and younger, because I grew up ubiquitous. It's just, it's just stuff. It's just the stuff of life. There's not other digital and the analog. It's just everything. It's ubiquitous exactly. And so I'm interested in this provocation of like, what about when we've got this point and time where everyone understands design? There's no longer this sort of push to integrate design. There's no longer this idea of design led processes or design led organizations. It's just everyone from your, your international relations grad to your engineer, to your climate policy expert understands design, understands even if it's a little bit regrettable, the double diamond or something else, gets what that is and understands the value of that process. And it's fully integrated into everything from early years education all the way through to the leadership of business. And, you know, I can imagine that happening, you know, in the next, in the next sort of 2030 years, I sat on validation panels and sort of surveys for various non-design courses that are integrating design units or design lessons into there and curricular. But then the question is then what happens to designers in that, in that world? And that's really interesting. For me, that's more interesting than the question what happens to designers with AI, actually, because similar to the digital, we still have computer scientists, right? The fact that everyone is now digitally native hasn't killed off computer science, it's accelerated it. It's resulted in these huge innovations around, again, AI, big data, you know, machine learning and things like that, because there's a greater cultural, corporate and popular literacy that enables more exploration of this particular ontology and by that, I mean, world view. So I think we'll get to a stage where sort of everyone in the commercial world understands design, everyone will be nodding. But if you ask them to write down the definition that that'll be slightly different. When you say the same with digital, I mean, if I was asked to ask someone who was deeply involved in operations, they'd probably say it's all about systems and processes. If I was to ask someone who's involved in buildings, they might say it's about how we use data to come up with the best parametric or environmental designs. If I was to ask, you know, someone who's a creative, it's about how we use digital systems to connect different stakeholders and people and get them to collaborate. Multiplicity is great. Various design scholars have written about this idea of design as a disciplinary that it's not really a discipline and this slicing of it into ever finer and finer disciplines is part of navigating the problem of it not really being a discipline but needing to put some structure around it. But then my interest is, you know, as I was saying, like, you've got these incredible advances in digital technology, you know, over the last few years as it's become normalized, I, you know, that's quite exciting for design, I think, if the same thing happens there. If you talk to clients and companies about digital, it almost always ladders up to, oh, it's an app. Right. And it might be a thing about something and it's kind of so much more. And that's where you get the, like, the nod, everyone nods like they're nodding dog in the back of the car. Yeah. And then when you actually peel it back and try and work out what needs to be underneath that, what needs to enable that. Then you start to have that, oh, no, I wasn't really thinking about that. Yeah. Looking at people who've come from MBA business backgrounds into sort of design type teams. Can we full circle back to this idea of how do you intentionally orchestrate multi-disciplinary teams when we've got design in there mixed with other disciplines? I think it's quite interesting to see how they define the role and the point at which design is relevant in the process. I think everyone sees himself as a golden thread and someone else is not somewhere along the process that sits in the certain bucket. But of course, I am the golden thread. So my provocation to that is that it's like sort of saying at what point in the process does writing stuff down become useful. Once you end up with this thing where it's not the design isn't a thing that's airlifted in at a certain point, but it's just what people do as they go about doing projects. As people go around writing stuff down or sharing emails or whatever, that's then super interesting. There's obviously huge cultural differences here and this is something especially now working in a global organization. I'm really sort of conscious of is that there are not only different understandings of design at different levels of seniority and experience, but also in different areas of the world. American colleagues tend to have quite a teleological or sort of output oriented understanding of design. It's like about the product very much whether that's a set of ideas or a thing, whereas European folks maybe have a rich understanding of it as a form of research and a form of knowledge production. It's all just about the sort of histories of design culture in those particular places and the way it's then taught in universities and how that's then gone into the various companies in different places. It sounds like the future of design and its ubiquity is the subject for another podcast. Yes. We've now come to the end of our Thank you so much for this. ranging and conversation and who Jean who's taking show notes in the back is just going no cup this bit, cup this bit. Actually, you pivoted to the idea of the different sort of culture or framing of design. Oh, that's genius, that's fantastic. That's a wonderful way to end. Good, thank you for having me. Service design, the App is a production from the Service Design Network UK chapter. It's hosted by me, Stephen Wooder, with production assistance from Jean Wattania. Music is by Ducker Stats. One of the best scientific minds we have today. We're going to make it custom probably remove anything that is going to put me in an orange jumpsuit. Or just make me really unpopular with the very few friends I still have.