Ep010 - Human Centered Design VS Planetary Design - Anna Várnai & Shuya Gong from IDEO

The Spaceship Podcast

Anna Várnai and Shuya Gong are two designers at the global design agency IDEO. They talk about what is Human Centered Design and how it goes with Planetary Design. IDEO uses Human Centered Design to create solutions with a positive impact and shape a global change.

Anna: We need to redefine the stories that we tell us, and if we see ourselves as part of nature, actually everything that serves humans and humanity, so it doesn't serve consumers or paying customers, but it actually serves humans, would hopefully also serve nature.

Laura: This is The Spaceship Podcast.

Clément: This podcast is brought to you by the special master class where we support change-makers and entrepreneurs in their journey to solving big challenges our planet is facing. Here we bring the theory to life by featuring thought leaders and impact entrepreneurs from around the world.

Laura: How do we design the future? How do we try to tackle the challenges the world is consistently facing, the human challenges and the environmental ones. Now, this is what we're talking about in this week's episode with our guests Anna Várnai and Shuya Gong from the global design agency IDEO.

Clément: Anna Várnai and Shuya Gong, so first of all, we are really glad to have you in the spaceship podcast. So thanks a lot and welcome.

Anna: Hey, thanks for having us.

Shuya: Yeah. So excited to be here.

Clément: You both work at IDEO, a global design company, known for its commitment to creative, positive impact, which is why we are so excited to speak to you both. And both of you work together, Anna you're a senior design lead, consultant and facilitator, and Shuya you are head designer at IDEO co-lab exploring how emerging tech and societal trends change systems.

Shuya: We're multi-purpose here.

Anna: Yeah, that's very true. It's usually hard to put it down, like to one title or two.

Laura: Why is it so hard to have one title when you're doing what you're doing? Or maybe even describe what you're doing. If you had to pick one title right now,

Anna: I would pick the title of design researcher and in a way I sometimes describe it that is part-time reporter, part-time storyteller or anthropologist and therapists. So I think that already might give you an answer why it's hard to like put it into one role because depending on the project and the challenge, there are different skillsets that are needed and different roles I step into.

But usually in one sentence for a living, I try to understand why people do the things they do and how we can design better products, services, or systems that actually resonate with them and help them thrive in the end

Laura: Does design in the way you're both talking about it, is this a more democratic way of thinking about the word design?

There are boundaries to it and the way you're speaking about it, it seems like it's something that's just everywhere. You can design anything. You can design the way you pour your tea into your mug. Can you just maybe elaborate a little bit on that?

Anna: There are two ways how I think about it, and there's one way when I see the word of "to design", I think that is an innate human capability that every one of us is designing if we're changing the state of something. So in a way it's understanding what's the current state and changing it to a different state. And then through the history of design as a practice, it professionalized. It was industrial revolution, so design was very much about white Western people making stuff and product.

Now we realize how much trouble it also causes, and what are the negative effects of designing if you don't think about the whole context. I hope that design and kind of like its next evolution will go a little bit more back to not designing new stuff, but in a way, designing the relationship between people or people and nature.

Shuya: There are two moments in many designer's lives. The first one of like capital D design, which is like, "I'm a designer". Like "I, I have a vision and I can change things in the world and I'm going to put a new product or service or thought or system out there. And I can design". But then there's the second one where they realized that they are actually a small D designer where there's this breakdown of identity and humility in some cases where you're like, "oh... when I capital D design, I am doing it for myself. And when I do it for myself, I'm going to create something that I can't really use because I haven't really thought about : how this is going to be affecting someone else, or how does it actually want to be used from someone else's point of view?"

Laura: No, it's funny. As soon as you talked about design with a capital D I just thought about high heeled shoes and how no one who would have ever been a designer with a small D would have ever created high heel shoes.

Shuya: I think the way that we think about design is closely tied to innovation. And there's this really, really beautiful concept from a lot of indigenous cultures where like, if you close you eyes and I were to ask you, like, what direction is the future in? A lot of people would point forward, like the direction that your eyes facing, like we're looking forward, the future is forward.

But if you actually think about it, like what you can see is your past. And like you can see all of the things that have happened in your past. And your future, our collective future is actually like logically, I think it should be behind us. In that we are backing up into the future and not really knowing what's there.

Laura: Yeah.

Shuya: It's really fascinating actually to me to think about how the design of a high heeled shoe is associated with women and female fashion and this like torture device, but the historical background in the context of a high heeled shoe existing was largely actually really functional of stepping out of mud.

Anna: It's such a beautiful story. We can actually create something that is not yet existing. We can design how it's being perceived. Then what you mentioned to you is actually people shape how it's perceived or how it's used and then media or culture and societal expectations. So that is an interesting way of how you, as a designer, you put something out into the world, but then the consequences is also something that you, in a way you can maybe think about it, but you cannot control it.

Clément: Do you think that man will wear heel shoes or that everyone will stop wearing heel shoes?? It's not a real question, it's kind of really diverting just to imagine the future.

Shuya: I hope that she was taking on different forms in the future. Like they should light up or like have GPS direction inside.

Clément: Anna and Shuya are our designers at IDEO. There, they use human centered design daily to develop new products and solutions for large organizations. They have perspectives that startups rarely have.

So now let's deep dive into how startup can use human centered design and play an important role in shaping a global change.

Laura: Anna, you just mentioned you can't really control what happened. I mean, when we think about environments versus human, when it comes to what we're designing for, can you make a comment about people who truly believe that we should be focused fully on designing for environment, not human, not our human interaction or our human experience, or why is that the center of the way we designed for

everything?

Anna: I think we all, at least in the Western world have been growing up with a story that we are like, we need to either protect the environment or we need to take things out of the environment. We need to take resources out of the environment. If we continue with this model, it will always be at odds. And it'll always be this tension between: are we designing like human centered or planetary centered?

We need to redefine the stories that we tell us. And if we see ourselves as part of nature, actually, everything that serves humans and humanity, so doesn't serve consumers or paying customers, but it actually serves humans would hopefully also serve nature. It's a super tricky tension because we know time is limited when we look at what we can do for like climate related challenges. But a lot of the crises that we currently see are human made. If there is one that has been designed by humans, then also the humans need to take the responsibility to undesign them or redesign them. What is planetary design? I think it puts us into the challenge of like actually questioning a lot of our mental models and thinking about much longer timescales.

So thinking in natural cycles, thinking in more symbiotic relationships so that in the end, it's not like one player winning, but actually :can you create something that contributes to the rest of the system?

Shuya: The classic example that I go back to is like Gingko trees. They're so old, they're such old organisms that they don't have any of the beetles and flowers and normal pollinators that used to exist when they were still there.

Ginkgo trees now need human pollinization and human cultivation in order to keep surviving. That's actually a really great example of nature having designed something so beautiful and useful and poetic and incredible as an organism.

Laura: If I had it my way, I would become a professional questionnaire if I could.

But the problem is is that I also have shit to do. Like, there are things I have to do. I'm thinking back to any business that I've started if I kept questioning what the externalities might be or what I should do first, or, I mean, there's a paralysis that comes with that. That's just totally overwhelming.

When you look traditionally at the startup journey, I'm saying that with like flashy lights, you know, the startup journey and all the big questions you should be asking yourself, what should you do first? How long do you have to stay in research? How do you actually action this?

Anna: It's not that or in research and then you go into design. It is an iterative process. So in a way you do research, then you prototype and you test and you in a way you're in a constant learning model, right? You maybe have an idea. Then you turn it into a business model or you turn it into a service or a product. You test how people react to it. You see if it flies or if you need to change things and it's never finished. It is not that you do research and then you act. But I would say you do things in parallel and actually you act to do research and to learn more. It also depends who you are. If you're an action driven person, go into action and then bring people on in your team who are good in questioning things or who are good in implementing things.

Why do we design products that are always on, like: can we actually create a product that goes into winter sleep for a couple of months or that goes into sleep overnight? Or that actually only works for a six hours and then it turns off automatically... like, can we actually rethink the technology that we create or the products that we create and design it, not to help people to work more and faster and make more money, but actually to do other things?

Shuya: We may never be as brilliant as nature. I think about radishes a lot when I think about this. And so when you plant a radish, if the weather outside is kind of cold and chilly, and it's the right conditions for this to happen, you end up growing the radish itself and you end up growing a very juicy plump root, but when it's hot outside and it's quite humid, the energy doesn't go into growing the radish. The energy goes into growing flowers to create more seats to store up for a season. And so that's something that I think about for businesses today is like the conditions of the future and what's going to happen are going to be changing, I think quite a bit faster than we're used to conditions, changing business world.

Can you be like a radish plant where you're able to store up your energy to use either as the product of a radish or as seeds for later, to be able to grow into different things. And that flexibility and that fluidity and then know how to engineer both kinds of operations and both kinds of nodes, I think will be increasingly important for businesses to do.

Laura: I think that's actually really, really useful .Figure out what parts of the system you might be able to grow in differently at different points in time.

Clément: So I wanted to come back on the iteration process. So the human centered design is really much on iterating, on feedback that we receive and so on. But I also see that the planet as a cycle that is most of the time, much longer in term of giving us feedback.

So we received the feedback of the plastic waste throw in the ocean and so on now, and we started 50 years ago, or maybe more. As designer, how would you advise an entrepreneur to consider the environnement . Or how do you integrate not only the humans in your integration process, but humans and maybe planet and maybe other things in your cycle?

Shuya: Well, I think about as the typical entrepreneur journey where your cycle is quarters and years, and maybe on the three to five-year timescale, because that's typically what I think of as a startup, having the runway to be able to think aboutand do. I think that your role in considering the environment, is maybe one that is a little bit more about firstly, do no harm. And then secondly, how are you using like small D design to create mindset and behavior shifts in the products and the services that you provide. And in being a very big and important signal and story that starts to affect the larger corporate incumbents in your industry or your space, who have the runway and cushioning to be thinking on the decades and centuries long scale. When we think about timescales, like nature changes at centuries long, decades long scale; corporations at the decades long scale and startups are at the maybe three to five years scale. So should be able to think, like I can make a decision that's going to impact something 10 years down the line is quite scary and ambitious for entrepreneurs to do because your runway on your capital and how upstream decision-making you have is just, is limited.

Whereas for a corporation, they are looking at planetary studies because it will affect their business , but they're also listening and looking for the entrepreneurs that are going to disrupt them and, you know, kind of shift what they believe the future is going to be. How you as a start up live your values of being environmentally focused and thoughtful about your design, your values and your storytelling, and you as a data point of just existing. The power that you have as a visionary, as an entrepreneur in the story and the signal that you provide, that starts to change hearts and minds and behavior change and faith in what people believe in.

And once you start changing that, you start changing culture. And when you change culture, that starts to move in waves of creating regulation change. You're creating large corporations to want to respond to that.

Clément: It changed completely, my perspective on startup are not actually the solution or like driving the solution or bringing the solution, but more acting as a trim tab.

We just give the push, but we don't have the fuel to make the complete change.

Laura: One thing that you could redesign in the entire world. What would that be? And it can't be shoes.

Anna: Is how we define value and how we actually define success in society. It touches on budgeting and business models. It's actually about redesigning capitalism because in the end, a lot of the things that are not good for humans and for nature, go back to this root cause.

Shuya: I would like to redefine how we define work, the time around work or models or how we get paid for work. And then I really want to redesign toothbrushes. I think that all toothbrushes should have like a devert. So that you can just hold it under the water and use that as like a little fountain to come up. And floss. We have not figured out a better way of flossing. At the product level toothbrushes and floss.

Laura: So that is hilarious, because you didn't even know this, but Clément is the co founder of a zero waste toothpaste company called Noice. So, Hey, we're ending off on a great note. Clément, you have a long list of things to work on now. So I've been compiling a list of all the topics that we're going to have to include in the show notes.

And we've got, I heeled shoes, Gingko trees, time, how we define value. I'm just going to add floss.

Anna: And radishes.

Laura: Just so you know, we've got a whole buffet for this episode.

Thank you a million times over Shuya, Anna, for being here for tickling our brains. This was really, really awesome.

Clément: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Spaceship Pocast, if you are curious about all things, sustainability, social impact, and entrepreneurship.

Be sure to check out our program at www.thespaceship.org. We'll see you next time.