Assembling Tomorrow: Designing a Thriving Future with Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter
Season 3 Episode 10 (Finale)
What do you do when the world changes faster than you can make sense of it?
The Season 3 finale of How We Future features Stanford educators Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter for a conversation about design, technology, and what it actually means to adapt in a moment of runaway change.
Scott and Carissa are the creative and academic leaders behind Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and the co-authors of Assembling Tomorrow, a book that offers language and tools to design a better future.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
Why if you feel NUTS! Or “Never Up To Speed,” you’re not alone.
What “bothness” looks like when technologies can simultaneously help and harm
Why speculative fiction and “histories of the future” help us think more clearly about the present
How playful practices like mapping your monsters lower fear and open better conversations
This finale invites us to slow down just enough to notice the narratives we’ve inherited, question the ones that no longer serve us, and practice designing — not just reacting — inside uncertainty.
Links from the episode;
Assembling Tomorrow by Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley
d.school Design Abilities: “Let’s stop talking about The design process”
The Secret Language of Maps by Carissa Carter
Make Space: How To Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration by Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft
Map the problem space activity
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Scott Doorley: We talk about media literacy and tech literacy. I think we need change literacy, like just the understanding of how it feels to think during such massive change and what you can do about it. The first step is just recognizing that it’s driving us nuts; it’s raising our emotions. We need to step back and look at just that so we can start to make better decisions.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow, starting today.
This season of How We Future has been focused on building the skills we need, but never learned, to navigate a rapidly changing world. We focused on finding clarity amid uncertainty and how to maintain humanity in the middle of runaway technology. There’s no better way to close out Season 3 than with my colleagues, Carissa Carter, Academic Director of the Stanford d.school, and Scott Doorley, the d.school’s Creative Director. They are truly two of the most inspiring designers and leaders that I know.
Together, they are the co-authors of Assembling Tomorrow, a book that gives language to the chaos of modern life and offers practical ways to reclaim agency in this moment that’s “making our nervous systems nervous”. In our conversation, you’ll hear how to build change literacy so you can make better decisions even when you feel nuts or, as Scott says, never up to speed. How activities like drawing monsters and writing fiction can reduce fear and invite more people into shaping the future, and how we can hold the good and the bad of emerging technologies at the same time without falling into either blind optimism or total despair. I’m so grateful to be ending this season with Scott and Carissa. Let’s get started.
Carissa and Scott, thank you for joining us on How We Future.
Carissa Carter: Excited to be here, Lisa.
Scott: Me too. Thanks, Lisa.
Lisa: Both of you have dedicated at least a good chunk of your careers to helping more people understand the disciplined skills of design. I, as you know, I’m a design nerd, and I’m so excited to get into all of that and more because I feel like design continues to be misunderstood in many ways and yet ever more important. I want to maybe start with the book that you co-authored, Assembling Tomorrow, which came out two years ago. It’s funny that it’s a book about assembling tomorrow that’s now two years in the past, helping more of us have agency in the choices we make to create the world we want to be a part of, very How We Future. Maybe, Carissa, I’ll start with you about what Assembling Tomorrow is about and why you wanted to write this book.
Carissa: The great premise of the book is about runaway design, which is the idea that what we put into the world is constantly escaping our ability to understand it. Let alone control it or utilize it. What Scott and I hope to promise in that book is that, yes, this is the world we live in. It’s always going to be. We have the agency to do something about it and to assemble it in the ways that work for us.
Lisa: What’s amazing to me is to think that you came up with that term, runaway design, when you finished writing the book, which was before ChatGPT, or any of these generative AIs came on the scene. You had the wherewithal to realize that emerging technologies are a design medium and will continue to be a design medium. We need to get better at understanding what they are and what they’re capable of. Before, Scott, I turn to you, Carissa, I just want to get your sense. If you thought it was runaway design when you finished writing the book, 2023 or 2022 even, where are we now?
Carissa: It’s still a runaway design world. I went to the Valkyries game last night, basketball, and-
Lisa: Valhalla.
Carissa: -I was thinking-- exactly, right? The idea is runaway design is like that. It’s like a basketball game where there’s a lot of chaos, there’s breakaways down the court, there’s some incredible plays, there’s blocks, there’s fouls. What we put into the world, it’s like you have to be on your toes in pivoting and noticing and reacting. Sometimes we do incredible things. Sometimes stuff goes wrong. Sometimes somebody gets injured. I don’t think that’s changing. We’re in a totally different landscape than we were two years ago, but the situation, the runaway design world is here, and I don’t know if it ever goes away.
Lisa: I’m so glad you brought up the Valkyries, and I’m so glad you had that instinct when you looked at them because I also am slightly obsessed with them right now, not just because they’re amazing and they’re building community, but because of the design choices that they’re making to do it. Scott, that reminds me, in some ways, this is going to be a leap that has not yet been made in the two years, I imagine, that Assembling Tomorrow has been out. The Valkyries, in many ways, represents how the book is organized. There are these intangibles that they’re creating, these flows and feelings that you get when you’re part of it, and that’s the first half of Assembling Tomorrow, helping name this moment, give us a language for it, and the back half around actionable.
Even though it feels like total emergence on the court, there’s a technique to layups and foul shots and protecting people. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you organized the book to be around these intangibles and actionables of design.
Scott: I’m just going to keep going with the metaphor, if that’s okay. Can we just keep going?
[laughter]
Lisa: Let’s do it. Please.
Scott: I think a sport is a great example because you come in with a plan. You come in with a plan, you watch the tape, you try to figure out what’s going on, you work on your fundamentals, you run your plays, you practice, and then once you get on the court, the other team has a plan, and they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do. Their plan’s probably different than the plan you thought they were going to have, and you have to react. The thing is, I think technology now has more of a plan than ever. It can think for itself, it can make decisions, it unfolds in ways that are way more unexpected.
I think the first impetus was trying to say, “How can we define what’s happening?” Because if we can define it, then we can start to come up with our plan. It might not work, but we can start to see where the leverage points are, what we’re actually dealing with. Carissa came up with this awesome term, runaway design, and that allowed us to say, “Okay, this is one of these intangible things, but if we define it as runaway design, now we can start thinking about how do we work on it.” We can start coming up with our game plan.
Yes, great, runaway design. Sounds interesting, but if you don’t start thinking about where are the leverage points, what can you do about it, which was what we call the actionables, it falls flat. Of course, you’re going to try something. You might try a zone defense, and then it doesn’t work, and then you’ve got to go man-to-man or woman-to-woman, in the Valkyries’ case. You really have to adjust, but it’s really important to have some fundamental ideas going in.
Lisa: One of the things I really love about the book is that it goes deep for folks that are well-versed in design, that are looking to figure out how to put their field of practice into the world to make it better, but it’s really for anybody that’s navigating this moment, Scott, that you talk about it. Very intentionally from the beginning, you invite the readers in, and I just want to read a little bit of the introduction that I love so, so much.
You say, “You live in a moment when the materials of making are blurring the lines between people, technology, and the natural world. Technology is getting more human-like as computers take on the task of thinking for us and for themselves. Nature is merging with technology as line-editing DNA basis becomes everyday occurrence. Meanwhile, our minds and media are so intertwined and entangled that it’s making our nervous systems nervous.”
I love that. Our nervous systems are nervous. Again, you’re naming this thing that we’re all walking around with, which we’re feeling overwhelmed, we’re feeling stressed out, we’re feeling stretched. Scott, I want to ask you to talk about a phrase that I probably use maybe once a day, maybe more. I should be giving you money every time I use it, which is that this is--
Scott: I have an NFT around it now, so you should--
[laughter]
Lisa: You do? You do. Okay, good. Okay. It’s on Ethereum, so we’re good?
Scott: Yes.
Lisa: We’re good.
Scott: Exactly. Yes, we’re good.
Lisa: You have this phrase that it’s a nuts moment, right? Can you talk about that?
Scott: Yes, NUTS is an acronym. You know, like every once in a while, suddenly you just get this little click. I was like, “Man, I’m just not feeling up to speed.” Every time I think I’ve got it under control, something changes. I’ve talked to folks who are running startups and folks who are trying to raise families, and everybody feels that we’re never up to speed. That has to do not just with the technology itself and the nature of that, but the actual speed of change, like the emergence, not just the technology. If you think of emerging tech, I think a huge part of it is this emergence part.
With never up to speed, there’s this acronym that’s N-U-T-S. I was like, “Nuts, it’s making us nuts. That’s exactly how I feel.”
I dug into what that means, like in sort of American slang when you think about feelings. Nuts has two different meanings that both mean something similar. On one hand, I might hear fingernails on a chalkboard, and that sound drives me nuts. It makes me feel bad. I feel off kilter. I don’t like it. Then at the same time, I might love the Bee Gees, as an example. I’m nuts about the Bee Gees. Bee Gees music, I love it. It’s like I’m nuts about that. In either case, I think the issue is that it’s an elevated state. If you’re a boomer who’s like, “I’m nuts about AI, it’s so great,” or you’re a doomer who’s like, “AI is driving me nuts, I can’t handle it.” In both cases, we’re just emotionally fraught. We might even be positively excited, but we’re still emotionally elevated. All the research shows that that emotional elevated state is a terrible place to make decisions from.
I think what we need is a little bit of like, we talk about media literacy and tech literacy. I think we need change literacy, like just the understanding of how it feels to think during such massive change and what you can do about it. The first step is just recognizing that it’s driving us nuts, it’s raising our emotions. We need to step back and look at just that so we can start to make better decisions.
Lisa: That’s so powerful. Again, things you talk about in the book around just naming things, giving it form, and also, just what a gift to all of us. For anybody listening, when you’re feeling that, to just be like, “Wait a minute, is it me or is it this moment? Is this moment making me nuts or is it me?” We have a tendency to blame ourselves. I think this gift of, now if you can name it, you can engage with somebody else. Are you feeling this too? What’s going on here? By the way, to your point, which part of nuts?
The other thing is, I’m wildly excited about this, or I’m wildly overwhelmed about this. Sometimes if we don’t pause and check in with where the other is, we’re making assumptions about something that I might perceive as absolutely awesome, and you might perceive as absolutely awful. I think that’s such a gift and such an accessible and approachable way to name this moment and gets to one of the things that I know makes me so excited to work with both of you and work at the d.school, which is that we are trying, these are my words, we’ll get to the vision part, which is so fantastic, but this idea that we’re trying to help our students learn approaches, methods, mindsets, practices for that change literacy to be ahead of it.
Carissa, you just have this gift of taking complex ideas and turning them into teachable ideas. I want to bring in a shift that you made in the d.school maybe six, seven years ago at this point to really name these design abilities that we wanted to include in our classes. Moving away from a single process that I know has become very popular, but really practices and capabilities that we can all learn. One of them that I think Scott named beautifully around navigating ambiguity. Who doesn’t need to navigate ambiguity? I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that shift from teaching a process to really understanding that this moment needs a wider set of practices. Maybe some of them in particular that you think are important these days.
Carissa: 10 years ago, Lisa.
Lisa: 10 years ago.
Carissa: Want to feel old?
Lisa: No, I do not. No, thank you.
Carissa: [laughs] I don’t either. I don’t either, but I was just looking at those dates. Yes, 10 years ago was when we first started to talk about this. This idea of when you are learning design, it is great to follow a step-by-step process. In the same way that when you follow a recipe to cook, it helps you be successful in what you make at the end. Then, as you get better at chefing whatever you’re going to chef, you start to learn to bring in different ingredients that you may have on hand, or you’re excited to try and experiment with, and you know you have a certain constrained amount of time, so you’re going to shorten the process here. You read salt, fat, acid, heat, and you want to try some new acid additions.
You get better, and you gain these abilities. You have a sense for what works and how you can cook and bring a dish to life. You don’t have to follow the step-by-step recipe. With design, where we have really evolved the pedagogy over the last decade plus, and this is everybody at the d.school working on this, I want to be clear about that, it’s not that one process works for everything. It’s what are the abilities that we need to embolden our students with so that they can become those chefs of whatever design challenge they take on.
We have done some categorization of what those abilities are. Some of them, the word tangible and intangible, some of that has roots in the abilities themselves. The tangible ones are about experimenting rapidly, learning from and with others, about synthesizing information, and about building and crafting intentionally. Those actually mapped to different parts of your brain that are focused and that activate when you activate that ability. Then there are the intangible abilities that don’t live neatly within one area. You mentioned navigating ambiguity, which is how are we taking on multiple challenges at once and allowing different possibilities to come to pass. There’s moving between the concrete and the abstract. There’s communicating deliberately, and there’s designing your design work.
I’ll say with navigating ambiguity in particular, this requires this fortitude of self and a confidence today. This feels more important than ever. You need to have a mindset that things are going to be okay and a perseverance that maybe felt less pressing a decade ago. I fear that we risk losing this ability with the onset of AI. There are studies that when people introduce AI into their workflow right away, and they learn to use it, and then that AI is taken away, and they have to do that task again, they give up much more easily versus the people that never had the AI to begin with. The idea that we might give up because we know that there’s a crutch, that’s something to pay attention to.
Where are we deploying this tech so that we can preserve our ability as humans to figure things out? Not just for the problems, but for ourselves. This is what it’s all about, is us as people thriving in the world. What does that mean?
Lisa: I love that so much, Carissa. I want for those folks that are still not sold that they are designers, even though they make decisions for others and themselves, because guess what? If you make a decision that affects other people, including yourself, you’re a designer. I love that in those abilities you didn’t say, make things look pretty, choose the right font, know how to draw, that these are general abilities. In fact, they’re so inspiring to me. I think I joke to probably both of you at some point that I wanted to put them under my pillow. I love them so much because people can relate to that. Again, who doesn’t want to learn how to navigate ambiguity better, and yet none of us have ever really taken a class on it? Again, back to that change literacy.
Who doesn’t want to communicate in ways that other people can learn from, get excited about? Who doesn’t want to be able to navigate moving between an abstract idea and making it concrete? These are general capacities for anybody navigating this moment of constant change. I love, Scott, that you really helped spearhead a full-on publishing of many of these abilities. Since that naming and framing beyond a process, I know, Scott, you really helped a publishing process, starting with our executive director’s book, Creative Acts for Curious People, to ending with your book. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the importance of making these abilities more accessible to more people.
Scott: Yes. I think the way both of you just described it is right on. These are abilities that are useful anywhere and always. I think, Lisa, you talk in your Class B from the Future about durable skills. These are durable skills. No matter if you’re going to be leading a company, you’re going to be parenting a kid, you’re going to be working with somebody. These are things that are just helpful to allow us to collaborate and helpful to allow us to make good decisions.
We wanted to create these entry points that somebody could find their way into these ideas depending on wherever they were at. There’s one book called Make Possibilities Happen that’s about entrepreneurship. If you’re thinking about, how do I bring a new idea into the world? You can enter that way, and then you’ll discover everything else. Carissa wrote a book called The Secret Language of Maps, and that’s about communicating. It’s about this communication ability and how do we use the act of communicating as an understanding, as a way to learn about the topic as well as display it in a certain way that’ll help people think about it.
Then, of course, we have navigating ambiguity. The idea really was just like, look, these skills are useful, but we want you to find them. We’re going to present them in different ways, and you can enter in whatever way makes sense for you.
Lisa: They’re beautiful books. I’m just going to encourage everybody listening to check them out. Carissa’s is one of my favorites in part because of the design of the book itself. Spoiler: within The Secret Language of Maps, not only do you learn about data literacy and map making and communicating intentionally with craft and how to present data in compelling ways, there’s a murder mystery throughout. I don’t know how many books have a murder mystery throughout.
Scott: Involving a dentist as well.
Lisa: Yes. There’s dentists. There’s all kinds of ways. I think each book has its own unique craft to it that I think is spectacular. I just love that they’re out in the world.
Carissa: Every time I go to the dentist now, as I’m laying there, I think, “She has no idea.”
[laughter]
Lisa: Scott, Carissa talked a lot about the tensions and the reality that a lot of these new technologies have good and bad involved in them. I know this is something that you’re thinking about a lot these days, about not even just navigating ambiguity, but how do we parse out the good and bad at the same time? The kind of, I think you call it, bothness.
Scott: Yes. It was an idea that started in the book, but then you have to ship the book, but your ideas don’t stop moving. I’ve just been trying to capture this thing. Let’s take loneliness. Is AI going to cure loneliness or cause loneliness? The answer just depends on who you’re talking to. If somebody’s pro-AI, they’re like, “Well, it’s going to help all older people who may not have access to regular conversation. It’ll make them less lonely because it’ll simulate conversation, so that’ll be good to help them avoid cognitive decline. Yes, that’s probably true. I don’t know. We haven’t seen yet, but I think that’s probably true.
If you talk to somebody who’s anti-AI, the answer is probably going to be like, “Well, we have evidence that people are using it as a replacement for human relationships and it’s sycophantic, so it’s not a real relationship.” That’s actually going to cause more loneliness. You know what? Yes, that’s probably right. I think we need to look at these things as not only do they have good and bad embedded, and we can’t avoid getting the bad with the good and the good with the bad to some degree. We need to look at actually the fact that oftentimes those things are completely intertwined. In this example, the loneliness cause and the loneliness cure both come from the same thing, which is that AI can simulate a human conversation.
You’ve got this one thing that AI is good at. It has both outputs, and you cannot avoid creating both. The question is, how do we talk about that? How do we mitigate the bad things? How do we accentuate the good things? I just think people tend to-- and I’m doing it right now, but people tend to create these two camps that people are anti, or they’re pro. I really think that’s never how anything plays out. It’s always somewhere in the middle. I think we just got to live in the middle and work it out. I think it starts by just admitting that there’s a middle.
Lisa: The other thing is that we’re not stuck on both sides, either this utopia, dystopia, which is just easy. It’s easy to grab onto. It’s a narrative we hold onto. It’s one that we’re familiar with versus, as you were saying, that either bothness or the gray in the middle. One of the unique aspects of this book that I love so much are these 20 speculative fiction stories that you intentionally thread throughout the book to invite people to that messy middle of the future, or not even middle, the messiness of the future.
Each one is so sticky and real. Then you also have what is appropriate. I think what is inherent to design, very provocative, open-ended questions on the other side. Carissa, I wonder if you could talk a little bit like why add these stories and is there a favorite one that you want to make tangible for folks listening?
Carissa: Yes. We added stories because writing fiction is really a way to try on a future world with different sets of circumstances. Each one of those fiction stories really tries to hit at the bothness that Scott is talking about. When you put forth a future world, and then you bring characters in it, their emotions and their competing desires come into play. It’s very sticky. If you’re trying to fish a coin out of the bottom of a pile of honey, you might get that coin out, but it’s going to be covered in that sugary mess, and the bees are going to come to it. You can’t do that. You can’t pull a coin out cleanly.
By putting a fiction story there, it allows us to explore: is this a world that we want to live in? What might we want to adjust about it? It’s really prototyping of the future. That’s what the fiction does for us. We have these sprinkled across the book that relate to the concepts in each chapter in some way. They’re all different styles of writing. I have a lot of favorites. One of my favorites that was written by Scott is called Love Machine. It is a story essentially where there’s a really dippy guy who is on a date with a woman, and she suspects, but she also knows that he is using an AI to answer every question that she’s asking.
When Scott wrote this story a few years ago, this wasn’t yet reality. Now we’re there. I’ll give you a little spoiler on that story, which is that there is a moment in the story when she says, “Are you using an AI to answer this question?” He’s like a deer in the headlights before answering no. It just shows how, at the time, it was really comical to me, like, “Oh my God, that somebody could get so wrapped up in this that they wouldn’t even be able to have a human-to-human conversation.” I think we’ve blown by that moment already. To me, it’s a favorite for both the setting and for describing how fast this tech has changed.
Lisa: It’s incredible to me because you call them histories of the future. What you’re really pointing out is that they’re histories of the present and soon-to-be histories of the past. I’ve heard, even recently, some very troubling stories from middle school teachers that say that their students put a text to a friend through AI before they even reach out, that we’re so dependent on the tech that we’re just losing our ability to have original thoughts, to put ourselves out there. I love that this was almost fantastical at the time that you wrote it, and yet here it is. I know there’s several of them throughout the book.
Scott, you know one of my favorites is the sibling rivalry one at the end, which has one of the most compelling opening hooks of all time. I’ve never forgotten it, which is, “Mom got really annoying after she died.” Can you tell us about that one?
Scott: Yes. It’s related to a similar thing with Love Machine, which is that it basically is this story about two siblings that are arguing over which version of their mom’s AI personality that they’ve resurrected after she died, which version they should keep. They each want the version that’s the better relationship for them. They’re arguing. Ultimately, it’s about our human relationships. In a sense, at that time when we wrote that, there were no services doing that. By the time we published it, so before even it came out, by the time it went to the printer, there were four services, and not just services that are general AI services. They were specifically resurrecting loved ones.
Your point to, I think, we need to understand how quickly our present is becoming past because the present and the future is moving, or the change is happening so quickly. I almost think it’s absolutely imperative that we develop a little bit of foresight or a little bit of sense of possibility of what’s coming or a little bit of anticipation so that we can actually just keep up with the present. If you don’t anticipate, you’re not in the present, which is, I’m sure the Buddhists would have a problem with that framing, but there’s something where it’s like we need to be able to look ahead a little bit more just to be able to understand what’s coming at us day to day.
Lisa: Yes, I love that. I often think if you’re not thinking about the future, good and bad, you’re outsourcing it to somebody else. I think these stories offer us a pretty low-risk way of diving into the future. You’re not making any decisions. I love that you said, “One story can inspire you to forge a future movement. Another might make you wonder if you should toss out your technology altogether.” I want to get to another favorite part of the book before we transition to talking about some of the stuff that you’re continuing to do and pulling forward.
This book is really also in that spirit of naming. It’s also about helping people grapple with things that feel frightening to them. Carissa, building off of your love of map making, I want to ask you about the practice of mapping your monsters, of both where that comes from and why that’s so useful.
Carissa: There’s monsters in all of our childhoods, like in Monsters, Inc., the movie, the monsters under the bed, the things that we fear. In that movie, the monsters start out scary, and then they realize that humor is the thing. Monsters have always had an important place in the public psyche throughout history. All the way back to the 1500s, one of the first maps was called the Carta Marina. It is this really ancient-looking map of the world that shows the idea of the continents and the oceans. It’s important to know that at that time, those types of maps were more used as encyclopedias versus a navigational device.
What you see on that map is really, this is what they knew about the world around them. On those maps, you may have seen slices of these, what they call the map monsters. It will look like a whale, but then it has wings, or it’s breathing fire. You may hear the “There be dragons,” those types of sayings around these fantastical-looking creatures. The reality, if you think about it, is that that funky whale-like creature is this mix between what was observed in the water by seafarers. They may have seen the fin go by, but not have had the ability to understand the whole creature. Is it a creature that’s there to help us? What does it do? How does it communicate? They don’t have all of the knowledge. They just have that tiny piece of the sighting.
It’s this merge between what was observed and something that is fantastical, based on a hope, based on a fear. When we talk about monsters, it’s that merge between here’s what I know because I see it in the world, and here’s something that I can’t quite pin down. By actually drawing it into a monster you put it out there for other people to react to, to keep it in public conversation. When we talk about monsters, it goes all the way back to where they came from, but we’ve been running exercises, Scott and I, with groups of people to have them draw their monsters about the work that they’re doing today, about what they know and about what they fear. It brings out the most wildly funky and weird creatures, and even better is the conversations that stem from where they come from.
Lisa: My gosh. What a great way to take down the temperature of these fears that we are just sitting and bubbling inside of us. I love that you’re adding this both historic element, not only of our individual childhoods, but also about how our ancestors thought about navigating unknown territory, putting out what they know and representing what they don’t know. Also that playfulness of like, draw your monster. You can’t be wrong. It’s your monster. Draw your monster. I’m so curious. Scott, are there some themes that you’ve seen come up when people draw their monsters?
Scott: Yes, I was going to say, and, Carissa, I have to give credit here. I get a little nervous about running that with people you might not think be into it, but we’ve run it with CTOs of SaaS companies. [chuckles] They totally get into it. There’s definitely a theme of like, “This is a monster that I don’t understand, but it understands me. I don’t know how it’s doing it, but it seems to know everything. There’s a lot of tentacles pulling on brains and things.
[laughter]
Scott: There’s a lot of that because you have to represent it visually. I don’t know if we explain that. Then there are also these ones that are not really monsters. They’re sort of a helping hand, but you’re so dependent on them that it’s a little scary. There’s a lot of interesting things about how tech is shaping our experience that come out. Then there are those sort of doomsday monsters too. The main thing is, in drawing it out, you just go into this mode that’s very playful and childhood-like, but then you’re actually able to express a bunch of deep-seated worries that a lot of times folks don’t have room to talk about otherwise.
You are able to give it shape, and when you give it shape, it brings it down to size. If you look at those children’s stories, a lot of the victory that the children will have is facing or meeting the monster and being able to say, “Oh, you’re not as scary as I thought, and I can handle you.” It’s that kind of exercise.
Lisa: It’s an empowering one, and even a reframing of this moment, and a way to connect with each other. Carissa, I just need to name: I love that you brought up Monsters, Inc.. When I’m trying to help people understand one of the core superpowers of design, which is reframe, that movie, it’s not about scares. It’s about laughter, the reveal. We were asking the wrong question all along.
Carissa: You know what? It’s also about is this notion that there is a dominant narrative and that you can shift it. In today’s tech world, we are surrounded by these dominant narratives that AI is going to be the way of the future, and we put money and power behind it. By saying it over and over again, it becomes self-fulfilling. We have to have ways for more people to talk about and manifest what they think need to be part of the conversation of the futures that we’d like to build.
Lisa: Oh, that’s so powerful. Yes. Yes. Don’t believe all the narratives. Flex more agency. Scott, I want to pick up also on something you just said, which is creating the conditions to be more playful. I, by the way, encourage everyone listening. Map your monster at the dinner table. Bring some pen and paper. Do it at your next offsite. So fun. Put it up. What a great way. Like, requires no technology background, just some time. You’ve had a long history of not only thinking about design and narrative and storytelling, but literally making the space and creating the conditions for people to be the most creative versions of themselves.
I think it’s worth noting to everyone that you were instrumental in designing the d.school. The actual physical space, which we just celebrated our 20th year, but maybe 15 years or so in the permanent space where everything’s on wheels and whiteboards are everywhere, and paying attention to why corners make us that much more productive while keeping openness. We’ll have a link to your fabulous book called Make Space that you wrote a while ago to allow more people. I want to really talk about some of the work you’re interested in now about space more broadly in our infrastructure, in our cities, and just some of the things that I know you’re thinking about regarding how some of these new technologies might change the way that we’re living and connecting with each other.
Scott: I think when we wrote the book, one of the things that we discovered in researching is how things that you don’t expect will have an effect on something really do make a change. It’s like these second and third order effects that are slightly indirect, but very causal. One of those is that the movement of people changes the shape of cities. When you start to think about that, it’s like, “Oh, yes, that’s obvious.” How we move through cities shapes the streets, the streets shapes where the zones are and where the buildings are, but you don’t connect those two.
Early cities went to the rivers and the sea because the shoreline is where the boats come in. Railroads allowed cities to grow up in the middle of the landlocked area. Horses and buggies created these winding streets that you have in all these old European cities. Cars created these sprawling cities you have in the Western US because those all grew up at the time that the technology was becoming mature. The technology of movement was becoming mature.
I’m really mixed; I’m going to be honest, on driverless vehicles for 100 reasons, which I won’t get into. I do think that’s going to be another one of these big fundamental city shapers because it fundamentally changes the relationship with the car. Specifically, it doesn’t stop, really. It comes, it picks up things, it drops off things. It might pause, but it doesn’t have to stop in the same way. Like if I have my car, I need to park it so I can get back to my car later.
If there are driverless cars everywhere, they’re just picking up and dropping off things wherever they need to go. What you could imagine is probably going to change where parking is. It’s probably going to create these little satellites of distribution centers around cities versus in the middle of cities. It’s probably going to lead to a more delivery-based system. It’s probably going to lead to more fluid avenues because of this sort of like you don’t have to park, you just have to pause type situation.
While I am very on the fence about driverless cars, I’m excited about the possibility of what a city built around that movement might look like. I think there’s a good chance that it might be more walkable; it might be more close, more connected. Who knows? We’ll see. That’s a hunch I have.
Carissa: I love that. I actually love driverless cars for a lot of reasons. I have a few hesitations, but I’m all for full autonomy. Not the semi-autonomy stuff, not at all, but the full. As I was looking for my Waymo yesterday, they have a neat little navigation thing where they tell you where to find your car. Instead of like, you have to follow the streets to find your car; there’s a little arrow that’s like a compass, and it’s like, “Walk in this direction 200 feet, and your car will be there.” I found myself like I’m cutting diagonally across a parking lot, making sure my arrow’s lining up. There’s cars here. How that autonomous car was expecting me to behave was not about how the city had been shaped.
Scott: Right.
Carissa: It needed that future that you’re talking about, Scott, where that planning had come to pass.
Scott: Yes. The insight was I was walking by over here on campus. The Graduate School of Business took a parking lot and made it into this little loop. I was like, what if parking lots all become loops? What’s that going to be like? I think it was 100%. All that happens there is cars looping in and out.
Lisa: All that happens is looping.
Scott: It’s all loops.
[laughter]
Lisa: Oh gosh.
Scott: It’s loopy.
Lisa: Well, it reminds me of something I think Kevin Kelly said a long time ago, founder of Wired Magazine, great thinker about technology, great optimist, where he says, “We shape technology and technology shapes us.” I think that that’s on full display. Again, going back to assembling tomorrow, I think that’s what you’re trying to do is empowering more people to be aware, to not outsource it, to find their agency in it. I think challenging us to think about not just the now, but what happens, second, third-order consequences is critical for all of us. I know, Carissa, as academic director, you’ve been steeping a lot of that into our classes.
I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about another one of my absolute favorite frameworks that you have created around helping more people understand how data and technology and experiences are. The materials of design are the methods of design. In this world of runaway design where technology is going to become more and more a part of our lives, not all of us need to get a PhD in technology, but we all need to be much more aware about what the technology is and what the code can and will do. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this.
Carissa: Yes. That, in the book, too, we depict it as a nested onion skin. It really talks about what we call the layers of design. You can do this. It’s one of my favorite exercises to do. You can pick an object from your desk, I’m holding a pair of adult scissors here, and you can look at all of the different layers of design that go into and affect this product. This is a product that’s one of those middle layers of design. Somebody decided that the blades are made of metal and a certain degree of sharpness, and that there’s this silicone inset in a plastic handle on the ones that I’m holding. The product itself has been designed. You can have physical or digital product design. There’s experience design, so how it works, how it cuts through the paper. The fact that I can fit three fingers of an adult, non-impaired hand through the bottom and one thumb up top, so the experience of using it.
There is the systems that affect even this humble pair of scissors. The distribution systems of how it gets here, of where the materials that this is sourced from are mined and processed and refined before they get into this product itself. The school systems that teach you how to cut. There’s all of these systems that affect it. There’s product experience system. There’s also, if I go deeper into the onion underneath product, there is technology that powers this. Both the technologies to do the manufacturing that’s a part of it, but also to assemble the pieces, to understand the types of materials that can be cut with.
Then there’s the data that powers all of that. The fact that this is an adult pair of scissors. If you’ve seen a child try to use this, it’s too difficult. I’m a righty. Most scissors are made for righties. You have to buy special ones if you’re a lefty. The data about who our objects, our things in the world are made for, all of this is design work. Whether you’re creating something highly technological like an AI or something simple like a pair of scissors, and it all has implications that surround it in the world, both positive and negative.
There’s implications about who can use this pair of scissors to do what, who might get cut. They’ll seem like humble little things, but they add up, and they have a lot of meaning when layered together. When you think about, “Well, maybe I’m not a designer,” if you make or interact on any one of those layers, they all affect each other. That’s what design work is. It’s knowing what you do and how it relates to the larger whole.
Lisa: That could have been the best definition of design ever. You’re reminding me, one of my favorite-- I don’t even think it’s a meme, but this also date me, how I think about design. There was a very famous movie that came out a couple of decades ago at this point, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I don’t know if you remember this about this-
Carissa: Love that movie.
Lisa: -very proud Greek family, Greek dad. There’s this one scene where he’s driving his daughter in the backseat, she’s with her friend, and he says, “Give me any word, any word, and I’ll tell you its Greek origin, any word.” That’s how I feel about design. Give me any problem, any challenge, any object, and I’ll tell you why it’s connected to design, really mostly to invite others to think of themselves that way and to be intentional about how they approach things, the narratives that they’re taking in, the choices that they make. It’s one of the many reasons why I just pinch myself that I get to work with both of you and learn from you and be a part of your journey in bringing design to the world, to more people in more accessible and inviting ways.
Maybe a final question for both of you, because I really could talk to you all day long, is maybe something from your personal practice. We are really hoping that How We Future not only gives people a feeling of optimism and possibility about the future, but also arms them with something pragmatic that they can do. Maybe, Carissa, I’ll start with you. Is there something in your personal design practice that you bring in, whether you articulate it in the book, or it’s something that’s emerged since then?
Carissa: I’ll say, Lisa, that I think that the things that I do in my personal design practice that feel the most special are quite simple and they’re all very tangible. I make a lot of really weird figures out of clay. They’re weird characters, often headless, in a range of different poses. I will just let you imagine what that is. For me, as a person who spends her day teaching and thinking about how design is shaping all of us and also navigating my own self in this world and that of my family and kids, I need a way to use my hands to slow down, to make something that takes a little bit longer but not too long.
Working in a medium like clay, that’s both, for me, not highly precise, but takes a lot of practice to do well. It suffices for me. It is having that side place to explore and create that, I feel, is a great balance for everything else that’s going on in our hyper-fast, meet-the-deadlines world.
Lisa: I love that. I love that it’s simple. I love that it’s analog. I love that it’s something that continues to mold and grow and that there’s no one right answer. It’s for you. It’s for you to have an outlet. That’s beautiful. Scott, what about you?
Scott: That’s beautiful. A gentleman that we work with named Thomas Both turned me on to this book that was in an article by the guy who wrote the book about flow, Csikszentmihalyi. I don’t know exactly how to pronounce his last name. He wrote it in the ‘70s. It was way earlier than Flow, which was the ‘90s, I think. It’s about how artists who are creative focus more on problem-finding than problem-solving. It just blew something up in my head. I worked in the film industry for a long time. The film industry is so much shaped around problem-solving. I’ll be a cinematographer, and I am problem-solving in the space of how do we make this visual work the way we want it to?
Design and the way we teach it is so much based around problem-finding. Is this the right thing to work on? I feel like with AI, particularly because the speed of execution is so fast that the problem-finding part is really important because I’ve seen actually several people I collaborate with go down these AI execution rabbit holes where they create something that’s stunningly executed because AI is generating all this amazing stuff. I think we got to go back to, “Why are we making this thing?” The shift back to problem-finding has been really important for me. Then the other thing is napping, which is just like, I think, is I love napping. I’m always overtired, so it’s easy for me to nap.
It gets to that nuts idea. It actually came for me when I was talking to this business professor, Baba Shiv, who works on this stuff a lot, how emotions shape decisions. He’s like, nap, walk, exercise, close your eyes, look at the sky. These are all more important to decision-making than reasoning through the problem and blah, blah, blah. I would say napping is important.
Lisa: I love that. Going to take a walk. The thing about napping is that no one is occupying your brain with ads or viral videos while you’re napping. You get to restore yourself.
Scott: [unintelligible 00:47:33]
Lisa: It has been amazing. I just want to end with really one of my favorite chapters of your book. Your whole book is dog-eared and underlined and all the things. The favorite chapter at the end, A Call to Action, where you talk about design for healing. You say, “At this moment, we can choose to harness runway design or get run over. All the while, technology will continue to get more intelligent, more creative, and more like us, and nature will continue to become more malleable and more like technology. How we understand, respond to, and create with both is where things will go right, wrong, or something in between. The path ahead necessitates design for healing.”
Thank you for that beautiful frame. Thank you for being healers in the world, healers in my life, and being a part of the How We Future adventure. I’m so grateful for both of you. What a joy for this conversation, and for the learning and work we get to do.
Carissa: Thank you, Lisa. This has been a really fun conversation.
Scott: Yes, absolutely. Thanks so much for the opportunity, too.
Lisa: Thank you so much for joining us for the Season 3 finale of How We Future. As we wrap up, my hope is that you carry forward some of the ideas and practices that help you assemble tomorrow. Naming what’s happening, slowing down your nervous system, and using design as a force for good. Pick up Carissa and Scott’s amazing books at the links in the show notes. They remind us that we are not behind, broken, or failing to keep up, and that we have the capacity to imagine, to connect, and to heal.
If this conversation inspired a new way of thinking about design, technology, or your own sense of agency, I’d love to hear from you. Take a moment to leave a comment or rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps more people find the show, and it helps us understand what’s resonating with you. If you want to keep exploring these ideas between episodes, check out the How We Future Substack, where we go deeper on the themes from the show and offer practical ways to keep building your future’s literacy. Thank you for listening to this season. It’s been an absolute blast.
As always, I couldn’t do it without my incredible producer, Kaela Rosenbaum. She really makes the design and production of this whole series possible. We’re already planning some amazing things for season four coming soon. I’m Lisay Kay Solomon, and I can’t wait to see you for our next season of How We Future.