Maz  Karimian heads up strategy at ustwo an employee-owned product design company that brings emotional game-inspired thinking to product design—some key quotes from our conversation below. 

About ustwo

“Monument Valley is the game and the game series That was so successful that usTwo games was split off as a sort of a separate sister entity, still under the usTwoi umbrella. But yes, that's been something influential, I think, on, well, frankly, the type of talent that we attract. But also the mindset we bring, that more playful, more emotion-centric approach to product design that has served us well.”

What He Does

“A lot of what I focused on has been the opportunities at the intersection of product design and game design thinking, what we call play thinking. And that's emphasizing the capacity and the importance of product design to incorporate a focus not just on functional outcomes, but emotional outcomes and explicitly target the certain ways that we want users to feel sort of before or during and after engaging with an experience that we've created.”

On Tech Overload

“We talk about ourselves as social creatures, which we are, but the society to which you belong, the community to which you belong, was never the entire world, and all the information in it. And I think that in many ways, we're seeing just various symptoms of overload.”

AI Transformation and Promise

“I don't think day-to-day transformation happens until it's usefully embedded in products and services that we already use and or integrated into products that we end up adopting.”

"The promise of AI, like all good technology, is to free up humans, time and energy, both physical, and especially mental energy, but to free up humans to be more human. "

Working with Clients 

We have a workshop, which we call “the user as player workshop”, where we essentially reimagine your product as a game, and your user as a player of that game, which is handy for cracking open and dusting off that emotional lens, 

In the case of iRobot and the workshop, it’s the opportunity to ask questions like..

How do we want people to feel about this robot in their homes 30 days after purchase? 

How do we want them to feel about it?