Embracing Awkwardness: Designing with Nature and Technology

In Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future, Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley explore the intangible forces that make it hard to anticipate how new technologies create impact and what we can do about this challenge during the design process for new applications.

Carter is the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford – also known as the Stanford d.school. Doorley is a Creative Director at the d.school, having previously worked in the film industry for more than a decade.

Together with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, they discuss how designers, technologists, and corporate leaders can more effectively harness transformative technologies like AI and artificial biology by giving more weight to non-technical factors like emotions, perceptions, imagination, and serendipity.

Key topics discussed: 

01:23 | The problem of runaway design

03:16 | The forces that make technology impact unpredictable

09:17 | The role of emotions in design

11:59 | Why we are not thinking about unpredictability in designing technologies

15:17 | Potential solutions to new design problems

22:22 | Applying these solutions to AI

24:20 | Implications for businesses

Additional inspirations from Scott Doorley: 

• Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration (Wiley, 2011)

Additional inspirations from Carissa Carter:

• The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data (Ten Speed Press, 2022)